: animals, as distinct from human beings; fictional or
imaginary beings
WHEN IT’S ANTISEMITIC:
This dehumanizing image, based on distorted antisemitic features, was spread by the Soviet Union as a way to discredit Jews as agents of the Zionist state (see Jewish features, Zionist). ‘A Zionist Cobweb Spider.’ A. Zenin, Sovietskaya Moldavia, Aug. 29, 1971.
A common form of coded antisemitism includes illustrations
and images that depict Jews as vermin, tentacled creatures,
reptilian men, and other “subhuman” monsters.
Antisemitic rhetoric that dehumanizes Jews laid the foundation
for the Holocaust, used as rationale by the Nazis to treat them
as creatures that needed to be exterminated. It appeared in
Nazi literature and other propaganda to spread antisemitic
tropes — including Jews as the overlords of global affairs, Jews
controlling minds, Jews’ quest for world domination, and Jews
as superior or elite masterminds (see control, New World Order).
Louis Farrakhan dehumanizes Jews by comparing them to termites.
More recently, antisemites such as Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan have referred to Jews as “termites” likening them to
unwanted pests who multiply rapidly, take over, and destroy
everything they touch.