OK, What’s With All This ‘Blood Libel’ Stuff?

Apparently Sarah Palin isn’t the first to use the term “Blood Libel in reference to the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the death of 6 human beings.

The first guy to use it was a conservative law professor in the (Malcolm Forbes-owned) Wall Street Journal. In that article he pointed out that liberals wasted no time to point the finger at Sarah Palin’s crosshairs website, where Congresswoman Giffords’ district had a bull’s eye or a crosshairs symbol superimposed on the approximate location of her Arizona CD-8 on Palin’s map featured on that website.

Seeking to hang the tragedy in Tucson directly on Sarah Palin’s – or Glenn Beck’s, or Rush Limbaugh’s – shoulders.

Geez, I know I did.

Mainly because this shooting is something that we should have expected, especially from a mentally unbalanced person as this kid seems to be.

And mainly because Gabrielle Giffords herself mentioned the existence of the website and how it appeared to incite others to do violence against her.

And from that time to this we still don’t know what inspired that kid to carry out what we now know as something that has been on his mind for 3 years now. We don’t know and the only way to know it is to rely on the word of a demonstrably unbalanced person.

And now Sarah Palin is pushing back with her Facebook video in which she also uses the term “Blood libel” giving pundits yet another rock to throw back at her: does she know what it is she is talking about?

The law professor, Glenn Reynolds, used the term just once, when he asked the question “Where is the decency in blood libel?” In that meaning, the term makes a little sense. What he is asking is how can “blood libel,” a false allegation that Jews murdered Christian children to harvest their blood to be used at Passover, in order to justify all sorts of retribution on Jews ever be seen as a polite remark.

The meaning is that just as Christians have “blood libel,” liberals are manufacturing complete lies in order to communicate their disdain and in order to justify their hatred for all things Teabagger.

In that meaning, however, he went a little over the top. Sarah Palin is one person who has never been subjected to death camps and genocide. Yet blood libel was used to justify both of them in the past centuries.

And blood libel is patently false. That Sarah Palin used unfortunate language to stir up her base is, unfortunately not false.

It happened.

Here is what Palin said:

“Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”

Now blood libel is a specific libel. It is a libel about the use of the blood of Christian children. Journalists and pundits (not “pundants” as it was pronounced by Palin) did not manufacture a blood libel, and law professor Reynolds did not use it in that way. But it is obvious to me that to the Alaskan huntress, the term “blood libel” has a kind of ring to it.

So she used Reynolds’ term and got it wrong.

The ignorance and fuzzy thinking of Sarah Palin continues to astound me.