It is true. A blood libel refers to a specific, heinous, false accusation leveled at Jews, for which Jews were murdered. It is also true that blood libel, as used by Sarah Palin to refer to the accusation that she caused the Tucson murders, falls close enough to the original meaning to be a connotatively appropriate usage. Finally, it is true that Sarah Palins usage of blood libel, however connotatively appropriate, was contextually inappropriate. The issue was the innocents killed in Tucson. The issue was not Sarah Palin.
It is true. We found the accusations against her out of line, and can imagine that if someone were indirectly accused of murder, she would want to respond. But a calm, restrained, compassionate response by Palin would have been to say, simply, what she said originally. She condemned the violence and hoped for the recovery of the victims. She could have simply added, after the accusations leveled against her, that, yes, she regrets her use of the cross hairs, but, no, they did not cause the shooting. End of comment.
Instead, with her genius for self-promotion, she came up with the blood libel term. If she wanted to call attention to herself, she succeeded dramatically. At the same time, we believe she dropped her credibility dramatically. Again, the issue is Rep. Giffords and the other victims, dead and alive. With her linguistic overdrive, Sarah Palin came off as insensitive and self-centered.
Two more observations: First, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach has claimed that Palins use of the phrase blood libel was correct not only connotatively but denotatively. He wrote, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal, that the history of the term blood libel pertains not to Jews, but only to innocents falsely accused. Boteach is historically inaccurate in the extreme. Historically, the origin referred specifically to heinous, false charges that Jews killed Christian children in order to use their blood to bake matzas. Historically, it did not apply to any other set of innocent people. Boteach comes off as a craven apologist for Sarah Palin. Shame on him for distorting history in order, it seems, to curry favor with the powerful.
Second, the blood libel against the Jews is not just history. It is still summoned, and still believed, in parts of the Islamic world. However connotatively appropriate Palins use of the term was, it had the deleterious effect of reinforcing its validity in the eyes of some, and of resummoning its ugliness in the eyes of a great many more who had never heard of it. Hardly an achievement to be proud of, but then again, hardly something that occurred to the egocentric Palin.
All in all, not a winning moment for Sarah Palin. At best, a pyrrhic victory.
At the same time, Palins use of blood libel did not demonstrate the supposed ignorance that those who do not like her to begin with read into her use of the term.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
