Is antisemitism a myth?

Antisemitism is not a myth.

It is real, Jews have been slaughtered in Europe way before the Holocaust. For long they were considered by the Church the 'killers of Christ'. And their living in ghettos and not mingling did not help.
Muslims and Arab were also demonized for centuries by the Church, thus the crusades.

Before the creation of the state of Israel, they thrived and were an integral part of life in the Arab world, the Middle East, and Islamic world as they ethnically they are Semites like all other Arabs and Islam recognized the Jewish religion as a mainstream religion.

Then came the Balfour Declaration which was in itself an antisemitic. It destroyed the fabric of Semite societies and pitched Jews against Arabs, both Semites. One could say that it was in line with the colonial policies of 'divide and rule'.

Definition: Divide and rule (or divide and conquer, from Latin dīvide et īmpera) in politics and sociology is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.

So antisemitism is not a myth, it is a sad reality but the word modern use is in itself is antisemitic. It is racism and chauvinism against Jews and Arabs and Muslims.



An article from the INDEPENDENT
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-anti-seminitism-israel-palestine-balfour-declaration-a8021191.html

A Facebook Post  https://www.facebook.com/Middle-East-Examiner-533390296813334/

I wonder if celebrating the Balfour declaration would be described as antisemitic given that Palestinians are Semites too!
Definition of Semite
1 a :a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs
b :a descendant of these peoples
2 :a member of a modern people speaking a Semitic language

Is there a truth is the fake news talk?

I resisted for long the idea of the responsibility of the media in shaping our populist crazy times.
After reading today about the Austrian elections on CNN and in the New York times and in so many other supposedly mainstream respectable news media, I started wondering.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/16/opinions/austria-nationalism-hockenos-opinion/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/austria-election-sebastian-kurz.html

 I do not understand the  discourse about the Austrian_elections. OVP is not a far right party, it is the equivalent of the Conservatives in England. True that the discourse was populist trying to win some of the FPO (extreme right) party voters, but they remain the liberal right and not the extreme right.

The results indicate that Austrians are unsettled by the influx of refugees. Austrians received the refugees with open arms at first. They went to the boarders with Hungary after they were badly treated by the Hungarian authorities. Austria received the highest number of refugees at this time if we calculate the number of refugees per inhabitant. The rest of Europe did not share the burden. With time this caused stressed and populist politicians played on the fear and frustration.

But the results also indicate that even those frustrated by emigration did not move to the extreme right, they chose to vote for one of the mainstream parties. OVP has been ruling Austria in coalition since long.
One needs also to pay attention to the fact that SPO (social democrat) was in the lead until a month ago when a financial scandal was revealed. Many people shifted then to vote for OVP because Austrians are very sensitive to corruption.

So why the warmongering of the media with references to Ausria' WWII baggage? The reporting was pure sensationalism, no real background research effort or fact check analysis.

For me it was like the drop that made the vase overflow.

I often wondered about why I was hearing simple two dimensional reporting and sometimes straight out false  statements on news from the Middle East. I often said it was due to laziness in research, lack of understanding falling in line with foreign policy priorities, etc. Not to say these are good excuses but they made sense to me.

This time, it is clear to me that the mainstream media, like mainstream politicians have dropped ethics and values for quick easy gains.

Sad state of affair; it is the failure of democracy when there are no proper fact checks and people do not have access to honest information.
Maybe fake news is not as crazy as it sounds.