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More from Juan Cole, professor of Persian history at the University of MichiganIn her first public appearance since the rampage in Tucson on Saturday that took the lives of six people and gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the initial target of gunman Jared Loughner, Sarah Palin today released a video that was short on compassion and long on defense.
Did she apologize for contributing to a public discourse laced with violent images and metaphors? No. Did she cop to having made an error in posting, on the Web site of her PAC, a map marked with gun sights over the districts of targeted Democratic members of Congress? No.
Instead, Palin claims in her video to be the victim of a "blood libel" -- a term that is typically used to denote the anti-Semitic practice of alleging that Jews used the blood of Christians in the making of matzoh. (I wonder if Palin realizes that Giffords is Jewish.)
In addition, Palin claims that her critics "seek to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults." Then she dares to invoke the image of Gabrielle Giffords reading the First Amendment on the House floor during that body's reading of the U.S. Constitution last week at the behest of Tea Partiers. She does not invoke the concerns expressed by Giffords over Palin's PAC map, which included Giffords' district among those marked by cross-hairs. [Video on site]
Palin Borrows ‘Blood Libel’ from Israeli Far Right
Posted on 01/13/2011 by Juan
Sarah Palin in her response to the controversy over her violent political imagery and that of the US right wing in general in the wake of the Tucson massacre, provoked a new controversy when she said,“Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."The “blood libel” was the false and outrageous accusation launched against Jews in medieval and early modern Europe by Christians that they stole Christian babies and used their blood in secret rituals. This bizarre obsession of European Christians resulted in attacks on and pogroms against the poor Jews on many occasions.
So why would a leader of white Christian populists (the kind of people who in previous eras have often been prejudiced against Jews) deploy the language of ‘blood libel’ to make her and her movement seem as though it were a persecuted minority?
I believe that the phrase was taken over by Palin’s speech writers from right wing Israeli discourse. Historian Melani McAlister argued in her book Epic Encounters that the US white right wing began using the Israelis in the late 1970s as a kind of collective Rambo figure to make themselves feel better about their declining power in world affairs... [More @ Informed Comment]
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