Posted on 01/12/2011 5:42:46 AM PST by reaganaut1
Sarah Palin, who had been silent for days, on Wednesday issued a forceful denunciation of her critics in a video statement that accused pundits and journalists of “blood libel” in their rush to blame heated political rhetoric for the shootings in Arizona.
“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own,” she said in a video posted to her Facebook page. “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 that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”
Ms. Palin’s use last year of a map with crosshairs hovering over a number of swing districts, including that of Gabrielle Giffords, had increasingly become the symbol of that overheated rhetoric. In and interview with The Caucus on Monday, potential 2012 rival Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota, said he would not have produced such a map.
But in the video, Ms. Palin rejected criticism of the map, casting it as a broader indictment of the basic political rights of free speech exercised by people of all political persuasions.
She said that acts like the shootings in Arizona “begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state.”
“Not with those who listen to talk radio,” she added. “Not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle. Not with law abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their first amendment rights at campaign rallies. Not with those who proudly voted in the last election.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I’m trying to find support for this concept, but I can’t find any real definition of “blood libel” that isn’t tied to false accusations that jews were killing children and using their blood.
I don’t see any real evidence of this “modern usage” that others have called out, nor do I see a particularly good parallel between “blood libel” and what the left has been doing to us.
They are accusing us of inciting violence, not of killing people to use them for religious or political purposes. It’s just a stretch; and since we aren’t saying the left is looking to have us put to death, that aspect of “blood libel” doesn’t exist either.
/.02
I think Benjamin Netanyahu is pretty close to Sarah Palin. It’ll be interesting if he has any comments on it.
That was an excellently succinct way of saying something that I have been using multiple paragraphs to try less successfully to convey.
Question
Define the word “Blood” and “Libel”.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to vote for her, if she runs in 2012, but her presidential sounding speech convinced me that I must
I don’t know anything about wtc, but r9 detoo is a notorious Palin hater and a hater period.
Clinton made popular the term “focus like a laser beam” during his first state of the union batch of lies.
He was talking about the economy but damn if I ain’t heard the term used a hundred different times on a hundred different things.
If it ain’t used for the economy I guess it is misused,right?
There is an insidious PC on the Right as well.
I suggest you do a google search for "2010 election results".
You have made it past the part of your education where you learn how phrases can have meanings distinct from the meaning of the words used in those phrases, right?
If not, at least it would explain your lack of understanding of the difficulty of the use of the phrase “blood libel”.
On the other hand, I think you do understand, because otherwise you wouldn’t suggest that the dictionary definition of “blood” makes the phrase “blood libel” common sense. It’s the interpretation of blood as a metaphor for killing that makes this make sense. Like the phrase “blood on his hands”.
Which is a good example of how a phrase means more than the words. It’s not that a person’s hands are coated in blood, it’s the REASON they are coated in blood that is implied by the phrase.
The real issue will begin shortly and that will be Gun Control, the removal of free speech and the dis-assembly of the Constitution.
It's high time to tone down your own brand of rhetoric and join the real fight against each and every one of us.
I think this is exactly where it is leading. Do you honestly believe that Sarah Palin is going to be able to go out into public now without increased security? Have you seen the death threats against her on Twitter? The MSM has been libeling her for days with accusations of murder and the moonbats on the left believe them.
“They are accusing us of inciting violence, not of killing people to use them for religious or political purposes. It’s just a stretch; and since we aren’t saying the left is looking to have us put to death, that aspect of “blood libel” doesn’t exist either.”
I sympathize with what you’re saying, but I can also see Palin’s dilemma in labeling the Left’s actions. If she had simply written “libel”, the likely response would have been snarky comments about her ignorance of libel laws. Really, she shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells with her choice of words. Her point was clear, especially the context within which it was written.
yea, your right, she was speaking from their perspective of “White people”
That is the image they have been trying to paint for the American People of the tea party.
What she said was ok.
I would have said things that they would have had to edit out.
what meant is that she is not responsible for the blood shed.
I stand by her.
Correct.
Neither is yours, seeing how, in post #178, you completely misrepresented the view of the majority of Americans on the value of the Tea Party.
You want to belittle others for their opinion, it would be best to first reconcile your own deficiencies.
99% of everyday Americans have NEVER heard this phrase before, much less know what it technically means.
We ‘get’ BLOOD and we ‘get’ LIBEL, and now we ‘get’ BLOOD LIBEL—Sarah has hit this one out of the ballpark and into the history books.
Of what? Gibson, in Passion of The Christ merely used the Gospels for all references to the Jews and their culpability in Christ's death. The film did not say that Jews drank the blood of new-born babes. But, Krauthammer in a column and others called the film a "blood libel". In its strictest sense, blood libel was the incorrect term to use to criticize the movie. However, in its hyperbolic sense (the context Palin used in her speech); it was perfectly correct (from Krauthammer's P.O.V.).
I merely mentioned the film as an example of it being used by Jews in a hyperbolic way. That is how language works. A phrase that means something specifically eventually gets used as hyperbole or exaggeration and loses its original meaning. as has been pointed out, the WSJ had already used the term in that way to describe the MSM's attacks in the wake of the shootings.
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