The post-shooting debate over political civility is cooling down, but passions are still raging over Sarah Palin’s claim that critics were guilty of perpetuating a “blood libel” against her.
Palin’s initial use of the term, in a Jan. 12 video message, drew sharp rebukes from liberals, Jewish groups and even some conservatives. Since then, however, several Jewish notables, including Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and former New York Mayor Ed Koch, have defended Palin’s use of the term.
Palin weighed in again Jan. 17 during an interview on Fox News — her first since the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) that also left six dead and another 12 wounded. Palin defended her use of the term “blood libel” and said she understands its meaning.
“Blood libel obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands and in this case that’s exactly what was going on,” Palin told Sean Hannity in the interview.
Liberal politicians and commentators were quick to put Palin in the center of the story following the shooting, pointing to a map on her website that used images of gun crosshairs to indicate districts targeted in last year’s midterm elections. Giffords, who was shot and critically injured in the shooting attack, was the incumbent in one of the marked districts.
Critics held her up as a prime example of violent political rhetoric that could have contributed to the gunman’s rampage.
During her Jan. 12 video message, Palin defended herself, insisting that “especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.”
Palin’s reference to the ancient fiction that Jews killed children to drink their blood as part of a ritual — one that has inspired pogroms, massacres and attacks on Jews throughout the centuries — set off alarm bells.
Jewish reaction to the speech ranged from outraged to uncomfortable to defensive.
“Perhaps Sarah Palin honestly does not know what a blood libel is, or does not know of their horrific history; that is perhaps the most charitable explanation we can arrive at in explaining her rhetoric today,” National Jewish Democratic Council President David Harris said in a statement condemning her remark.
The Anti-Defamation League said it was inappropriate to blame Palin after the Tucson shooting and that she had every right to defend herself.
But, the organization noted in a statement, “While the term ‘blood libel’ has become part of the English parlance to refer to someone being falsely accused, we wish that Palin had used another phrase, instead of one so fraught with pain in Jewish history.”
Jews for Sarah, a pro-Palin group, defended Palin, a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2012.
“Gov. Palin got it right, and we Jews, of all people, should know a blood libel when we see one,” said a statement from Jews for Sarah. “Falsely accusing someone of shedding blood is a blood libel.”
In a column this week, Koch, a Democrat, declared that Palin had “defeated her harsh and unfair critics,” and argued that these days the “blood libel” term can “be used to describe any monstrous defamation against any person, Jew or non-Jew.”
Dershowitz, also a Democrat, noted in a statement that he had used the term to describe accusations against Israel by the Goldstone Report, and said there is “nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic” in Palin’s use of the term.
Boteach, in a post on his website, said that Palin had “every right” to use the term, asserting that “the expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.”
The question, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, was whether using a charged term such as “blood libel” reinforced Palin’s legitimate argument against the targeting of the right wing in the days after the shooting, or whether using the term undercut the point.
“It distracts from her argument, which is thoughtful,” Jamieson said in an interview. “If you are trying to get an audience to rethink, you don’t inject this particular historic analogy.”