Who’re You Calling a “Zio”?

As if there weren’t enough words for Jews, we’ve now been informed by a news story from England that the people who don’t like them have a new one.

The story concerned the resignation of Alex Chalmers from his position as co-chair of the Oxford University Labor-party club after accusing it of widespread anti-Semitism. One expression of this anti-Semitism, Chalmers said, as reported by the February 16 Daily Mail among others, was “throwing around the term ‘Zio’ with abandon.” This, the Mail explained to its readers, is “a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan.”

Actually, the Klan, or at least the website WikiZio run by David Duke, its former grand wizard and recent endorser of Donald Trump, seems to prefer “Zio-” with a hyphen, as the first half of a compound word. “Zio-Communism,” “Zio-economics,” “Zio-history,” “Zio-supremacism,” and “Zio-occupied America” are but some of the choices that WikiZio offers browsers to click on. The lunatic fringe of the American right also sometimes uses Zio as an unhyphenated adjective, e.g., “He [Trump] has called out the needless Zio wars in Iraq and the Mideast.” Zio as a noun, however, appears to be more popular in the UK than in the KKK. This month it surfaced in yet another news story about a prestigious British university, the London School of Economics, where a candidate to head the students’ union called his opponents Zios and then apologized.