The second part is about groups for various reasons supporting Israel. Some of those reasons are nefarious like those of Christian apocalyptic groups while others have good intentions like supporting democracy in the Middle East. Then people have different ideas of what support constitutes because they have different objectives, ranging from establishing peace, making a buck off selling weapons, or supporting territory expansion from a safe distance.

Alison — the title, yes, is a rather outlandish suggestion, though not entirely unserious. (Note that it doesn’t advocate a _permanent_ retirement of the word. Just something Michael Jordan-esque.) But I’m tired of seeing things like Rev. Wright say (my paraphrase), “Whoops! Meant to say ‘Zionists.’ Wouldn’t make a lick of sense to have said that, I know, but I’ve just got no clue how ‘them Jews’ slipped out instead,” or, on the other hand, the Goldfarb “Sullivan-said-Neocon-by-which-he-meant-Zionists-by-which-he-meant-Jews!” canard. Or comparable situations minus my gratituous infusion of snark or the actors’ insistence upon self-parody.

And while the the word may have a specific dictionary meaning, it no longer has any specific meaning in discourse. (I’m going to refer again to my example above: there are almost certainly people who would call me a Zionist, but there are also almost certainly those who call themselves Zionists would say I’m anything but one.) Discourse, not a dictionary, is where words have more meaning in life — especially inherently political words, like this one. And words in discourse can become dangerous when they approach meaninglessness — especially in political discourse.

Below is from Merriam-Webster online:

zionist
2 entries found.

1. Zionism
2. anti-

Main Entry:
Zi·on·ism Listen to the pronunciation of Zionism
Pronunciation:
\ˈzī-ə-ˌni-zəm\
Function:
noun
Date:
1896

: an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel
— Zi·on·ist Listen to the pronunciation of Zionist \-nist\ adjective or noun
— Zi·on·is·tic Listen to the pronunciation of Zionistic \ˌzī-ə-ˈnis-tik\ adjective

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zionist
*
For information on what this means see http://www.ifamericansknew.org

Admirable use of ‘positive _anymore_’. In standard American English, the word _anymore_ is a so-called ‘negative polarity item’, which is linguistics-speak for an adverb that can only be used in negative statements, and in this case, also questions. But some non-standard dialects allow its use in positive statements as well, as yours obviously does. Well done!

By the way, the rest of your blog entry is a fine analysis of what we linguists call ‘semantic bleaching’, where the meaning of a word expands to cover new contexts over time, until, as in this case, it ends up losing almost any specific meaning. Really the next step is for ‘Zionist’ to turn into a grammatical function word, like ‘if’ or ‘and’.