The people who were really blood libeled often ended up dead or in prison, and many were sent off to gas chambers.
It’s like using the word slavery to describe some minor inconvenience of government; you might feel like you are enslaved, but to those who experienced slavery, your attempts to equate your plight with theirs will seem shallow and self-serving. (Yes, I know that these days there aren’t people around who have esperienced slavery, so it’s not a perfect analogy).
This is like how the blacks get upset when gay people try to claim that they are as oppressed as blacks were, and deserve the same corrective treatment. Blacks who actually went through segregation, fear for their lives, being treated as second-class citizens, being denied work, being pushed to the back of the bus, all simply for what they LOOKED like, resent gay people trying to claim equal victimhood.
What the left is trying to do to the right is absurd, and uncivil, and reprehensible. False accusations that we contributed to murder, with all evidence pointing elsewhere, is beneath contempt. But we aren’t in danger of being rounded up and sent to death camps. At worst, one or two people might have their chances at getting elected President damaged, and their reputations sullied. That’s bad, but it’s hardly the same as what Jews experienced in Europe when they were being “blood libeled”.
Sometimes it’s best NOT to try to take other group’s specific oppressions, and use their words to describe your own sufferings. It suggests an equality that will most likely turn people’s sympathies AGAINST you.
Frankly, we had WON this battle already. Most americans rejected the claim, and we were getting sympathy. I think the left can easily spin the use of the term “blood libel” and remove most of that sympathy.
I think Benjamin Netanyahu is pretty close to Sarah Palin. It’ll be interesting if he has any comments on it.
Simply put, a blood libel is libeling one or a group of innocent people with the death of others for personal gain - typically used against a group of individuals (at least to me and many others it would seem; that is the ultimate layman’s understanding of the term). Words evolve or are used to explain or analogize things. Strict adherence to the original usage of the term (and doing so by pointing to the outcome of someone having been blood libeled) is an extremely simplistic view. Blood libel is not outcome based for the person being libeled, a blood libel is simply a libel of blood on the hands of innocent people. A perfect use of the term without strict adherence to the original usage of it (why would it need to be - it has been used in more than one context historically as has already been shown).
I know, technicalities (or so some would think anyhow). That apparently doesn’t wash with a great deal of people on this forum or elsewhere (I’ve heard many people use the term in the same context as Sarah did here and it seems perfectly legit to do so).
It’s like using the word slavery to describe some minor inconvenience of government”
Not at all. The people the left libels often end up in gulags or killing fields. The blood libel Palin referred to was an effort to discredit an entire group of people to which, incidentally, we both belong. If history gives them the chance they will, to borrow a phrase from Congressman Kanjorski, put us up against a wall and shoot us. There is no trace of hyperbole in Palin’s use of the term blood libel. If you think there is, you haven't been paying attention.
I think you're conflating the terms "blood libel" and "pogrom." If Sarah had used the latter term, I would definitely agree with you, but even by the most strict and clear-cut definition of the term "blood libel," it precisely defines the leftmedia's actions following the shooting.
A child disappears in medieval Europe - perhaps falling into a river or a pig pen. A frantic search is mounted for the child, to no avail.
Leaders of the town then loudly proclaim without a shred of evidence that the town's handful of Jews must have kidnapped the child, killed her, and used her blood for baking matzah, "because everyone knows that's what they do."
That action on the part of the leaders is what constitutes "blood libel."
When the leaders suceed in inciting a mob to burn down the synagogue and lynch the town's Jews, that is a "pogrom," not a "blood libel."
I hope this clarifies why Palin's use of the term "blood libel" is exactly precise and accurate.