What Is Semitic?  

A Letter to Ali Sina And

To Whom It May Concern.  

Frederic-John Decat.    

Dear Ali Sina.  

You mention somewhere, in many places, that Muslims are not the problem, that the problem lies with Islam. I do agree, yet you don’t get to the very root of the problem, and until you do, you will not be able to eradicate the phenomenon. Islam is only the manifestation of a much deeper problem. Now, please, don’t get to the barricades at first, before I explain why I consider Semitic values as the basic problem any humanist society has to face.  

First things first. I must define what I mean by Se-mitism. A lot of misunderstandings resulted already by our false notion of what semitism is all about, particularly in its opposition to the ‘’Aryan’’ values. After years of studies, around these notions, I can say they have been both dully corrupted.  

As an Iranian, you should be (and have to be) much concern about the real signification of the word ‘’Aryan’’, since it is the basic word from which emerged the name Iran (just as the name Ireland ). They both mean ‘’Land of the Aryans’’. The Ger-man corruption of this notion, through a racial bias, is responsible for the tragic emergence of Nazism. This racial bias can’t be the real meaning of a word used by Buddha, when he talked about the ‘’four noble truths’’. He then uses the word arya on purpose, since it is related to being noble. SO, WHAT IS REALLY IMPLIED WITH THIS TERM ? IT IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO HAVE A PRECISE KNOWING OF WHAT IS MEANT BY THIS NOTION. Once, an English ambassador said that a ‘’Nation was born out of Sanskrit’’. He was, of course, referring to the German nation.

Until around 1870, the german people were toys of the great powers surrounding them : France , Rus-sia , Austria and England . Their weakness came from their inner divisions. It was Bismarck who reunited them, the same Bismarck responsible for the introduction of many social insurances that some countries enjoy now.  But we have to cut this short, in order to get to the basic meaning of the notions opposing what is semitic to what is Aryan.  

Studying of these archaic notions bring us back to the Indian Rig Veda and to Iranian Zoroaster’s Gathis and Zend Avestas. Unfortunately, too many so called scholars; ignore them completely. Those who pretend to know them, see them through the distortion of an ‘’Aryan invasion’’. But, here, we don’t really have to go through this fallacious interpretation, a make-up originating from unproven premises conveniently accepted as an academic standard. Here, we only search for the basic meaning of the word Arya. As the scholar L. A. Waddell showed, this term originated from the Sumerian word for plough: ‘’AR’’. Arya and Aryan have to be related to agriculture.  

The term semitic was first coined by a german scholar, M. August Ludwig Schlözer in 1870, soon to be accepted as a term defining a language family characterized by a writing from right to left and some vocabulary concordances. I can’t say where exactly it came to be related only to the Jews, on a racial hating ground, but that’s an obvious distortion. Some historians place the beginning of Semitism with the Acadians, but more surely it came with the Assyrians, beginning around ~1800.  

So Aryan is basically related to the agriculture re-volution. We tend not to realize enough that this revolution is the most important one ever to happen in the history of mankind. As a matter of fact, it came with a mutation of our Y chromosome and, since then, we can retrace its development. We almost take for granted that such an obvious amelioration went by itself without much conflicts or opposition. The exact contrary happened. To show how this revolution is not even yet everywhere, only 20% of the west European population has this mutation in its chromosome Y!   

We don’t figure out enough how much this revolution encountered resistances from the pastoralist nomadic tribes. They just couldn’t accept for themselves what they considered a voluntary enslavement. Worst, they perceived that kind of settlement as feminine, not worthy for manhood. This is still the case in some places in Africa , where women have to do the agricultural tasks, while men are warriors and hunters-gatherers.  

In a nomadic view, Nature being God’s creation, everything belonged to Him, and so they felt free to bring their cattle (mainly sheeps) wherever there was a good pasture to feed them. Nature was to provide and pastoralists never venerated animals, especially of the domesticated kind. At best, they were walking food to dispose at their convenience. On the contrary, aryan domesticated animals came to be venerated as god’s blessings and men’s best friends. The cow was particularly sacred, as shown in the Egyptian mythology and it is still top sacred in India , where they freely get around.  

Now, we can easily imagine what happened when these tribes brought their cattle to feed on the agricultural harvests. Of course, the Aryan farmers were not to accept the result of so much works (including irrigations, canalisations, sewers, tillage, grazing, planting, seeds, etc.) to be erased by the pastoralists’ spoliation. They call those unconscious malevolent ‘’barbarians’’. To reply to the nomad’s raids and razzias, they founded the cities, as their efforts could nourish more and more people. Cities had a protecting duty in exchange. It is well known that cities were the core of what came to be called Civilisation. Kings, artisans, priests, craftsmen and trades on a vast scale came from existing cities, which were only possible through their agricultural surpluses. It involves a community sense very different from the tribal ones.  

Nomadic pastoralists reacted by organised raids. But cities showed to be powerful enough, long as they didn’t fight each other, to repulse the most ravaging Semitic razzias, though some succeeded at times, in like the Acadians. The Middle East his-tory is made of constant waves of one or the other way, from Gutiens and Khassites to  the Assyrians.

The domestication of horses, especially after the introduction of the saddle and then of the stirrups,  gave the nomadic tribes the advantage of mobility. Cavalry became a dominant factor in battles as depicted by the Arabs and Mongols phenomenal successes. Sieges techniques were improved by the Assyrians, mostly with the ram on rail able to break fortresses’ doors. In the west, the equivalent of the desert nomads, were to be the Vikings.  

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