It is not every spring that graduation speeches delivered in obscure schools and colleges a continent apart make headlines, but two recently have, one at City University of New York’s law school and another at El Camino (California) Community College.

Both Muslim females at the podia wore non-American clothing and head covering. One is a native of Yemen, and the other claims to be a “Palestinian” but, like all others who make this claim, there is nothing Palestinian about her.

Both used their time at the microphone to voice the delusions of Jews doing terrible things. The one in El Camino said the Israelis are “killing Palestinians every day…in an oppressive apartheid state…torturing Palestinians as we speak.” The female jihadi in New York expressed her opinion on several social and political issues, fingering “World Zionism” as the No.1 menace to mankind.

Of course, Israel supporters were outraged at the shocking “anti-Semitism” in both speeches, but I beg to differ. What was on display was not anti-Semitism (in its original sense), but Islam, which began as a religion of Jew-hatred twelve centuries before the term “anti-Semitism” was ever coined in the West.

As a neologism, “anti-Semitism” is in a class with Islamophobia, Homophobia, Transphobia, etc., all tendentious, dishonest perversions of reality and truth. The word surfaced in the second half of the 19th century after many Europeans in the chattering classes had lost their faith in Christianity. Unintentionally, that loss of faith deprived them of a Christian’s “legitimate” way of hating Jews as Christ-killers. If you no longer believe in Jesus as divine, you can no longer hate the Jews in your life for killing him.

Image: Jana Abulaban happily spews Israel hatred. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

After the Enlightenment saw Jews emancipated from ghettoes and granted citizenship, Europe had plenty of people uncomfortable with both this new dispensation and the Jews’ presence as never before in the public square. They were as uncomfortable sitting next to a Jew on a train in 1850s Vienna as a white citizen in 1950’s Birmingham, Alabama, was when sitting on a bus next to a black person.

This was the age of Darwin, the new academic discipline of anthropology, and the Higher Criticism of the Bible, so the solution was to rebrand the Jews. No longer could they be a nation dispersed around the globe for their cosmic crime of “killing God.” Now, they were born again as a race, which is a biological condition. No longer would Jews be shunned for their timeless fidelity to their G-d; now, they were obnoxious as Semites native to Asia. As Asiatics, they were as alien to European life as African blacks.

Only, there never was in history even one person calling himself a Semite and being called that by others. What 19th-century post-religious anti-Jews did was to pilfer a term from the study of languages, whose scholars categorized languages into numerous groups, e.g., they called French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and, of course, Italian the Romance languages. As for Hebrew and cognates (e.g., Aramaic, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Amharic, Arabic), these were called Shemitic (sic) after Shem, one of Noah’s three sons. (Over time, the “h” fell away.)

So “Semitic” was invented without reference to a people, a community, or a common culture. It existed as a neutral linguistic designation until modern, post-Christian Jew-haters stole it to claim they had no problem with Jews and the Jewish religion. After all, Karl Marx said religion was just a narcotic. Instead, the modern cadre of haters pointed to the Jews’ alien race with foreign ways that made it impossible to assimilate them into European society.

Hence, those opposed to allowing Jews to integrate insisted they were not Jew-haters but were, instead, “anti-Semites.” At its birth, the term did not connote mass murder; that was for the next century. Its purpose was to bolster those opposed to giving refuge to Jews in Western Europe running from Russian pogroms.

It’s different with today’s valedictorians, spokeswomen for the Islamic persuasion. Their religion’s hatred pre-dates so-called modern anti-Semitism by more than a millennium. It is right there in the Koran.

Numerous verses are plainly and explicitly hateful and hostile to Jews. Muslims are forbidden to become friends with them (in truth, with any non-Muslim). Jews are required to be “oppressed and humiliated”—and they were every day in Muslim countries from the beginning.

And why? Because they continue to refuse to accept that the last and greatest prophet of all in the Jewish Bible was Muhammad.

Because the Jews refuse to convert to the One True Faith, they must pay a yearly “jizya” tax for the right to go on practicing their faith when they know deep down that Islam is the “Correct Religion,” the proper interpretation of the theology of Ibrahim—a name they chronically mispronounce.

So, it is a bit inaccurate to call those two hateful Muslim females “anti-Semites.” More simply, they are Muslims whose religion is a form of Jew hatred. There is not a single original religious concept, idea, or principle in Islam not stolen from Judaism. In the same way, they hunger to steal what the Jews brought back to life in a land that, until the 20th century, they never called “Filistin” (a proper noun so alien to these descendants of nomadic, desert-dwellers, they cannot even pronounce it properly).

Sha’i ben-Tekoa is the author of PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians as the Obstacle to Peace and podcasts at phantom-nation.com.