I was struck by today’s response of Sarah Palin to criticism that her rhetoric and “targeting” of Rep. Gifford’s district may have added to the recent massacre in Tucson. In fairness to Palin, the family stated today that Jared Loughner did not watch news or listen to talk radio. However, I was most interested in her claim that the attacks against her and conservative commentators amounted to a “blood libel.”
On her Facebook page, Palin has the following comments:
But, 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. That is reprehensible.
There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.
Of course, she is not speaking of actual libel. Such criticism of the over-the-top rhetoric of conservative commentators is clearly opinion and not defamation.
“Blood libel” is a term usually associated with religious groups who are accused to killing innocents. Blood libels have a strong anti-Semitic history, such as claims that Jews feed on the flesh or blood of innocent children. For that reason, the Anti-Defamation League has denounced the use of the term — though I do not believe that the simple use of this term is evidence of any anti-semiticism by Palin.
That is a pretty loaded term to use for the criticism over violent terminology and over-heated rhetoric. Indeed, it seems to emphasize a degree of persecution. There is probably some distance between dueling and discourse.
The closest term in torts is “group libel” which (as discussed earlier) is generally difficult to establish.
If either term is relevant, there appears to be an ongoing effort on both sides to tag the other with the massacre. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stated “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information. . . [Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.”
Limbaugh has reportedly fired back by saying that the Democratic Party supports Loughner and is “attempting to find anybody but him to blame.”
In the meantime, members are moving toward a spasm of new laws to criminalize speech.
There is of course another obvious possibility: Loughner is mentally unstable and fully motivated by his own personal demons. Of course, this does not mean that we should not reexamine the rhetoric of our politics.
Frankly, I also share the concern of conservative commentators with politicians like Bernie Sanders (who I agree with on many issues) referring to the massacre in fundraising appeals. This massacre has somehow become about the politicians as opposed to the killer or the victims. That alone says something about the state of our politics.
Jonathan Turley
Alexander Cockburn:
If Palin was in the Animal Rights movement she would have been indicted, sentenced and imprisoned long ago. To draw a specific comparison: the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website which posted the names and addresses of individuals tied to the animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences. They were not charged with any act of property destruction, they were charged with “conspiracy” on the grounds that they should be held accountable for the actions of others in the same movement.
Palin of course is a vigorous opponent of abortion. An anti-abortion campaigner back in the 1990s ran a website called The Nuremberg Files. It published the names and addresses of doctors who performed abortions and others who made that possible, either by running clinics or providing protection or issuing legal opinions from the bench. When one of the doctors on the list (or clinic owners, cops providing protection, judges, etc.) was killed, a strike-through line would appear over their information. When they were wounded, their names would be greyed out. In its old form the site is now down after a court ruled following the murder of Dr Barnett Slepian that the strike-through and euphoric rhetoric accompanying each ‘aborted’ abortionist amounted to incitement. Check out what’s on line at present, from the man who originated the site: http://www.christiangallery.com/.
What’s missing now is the detailed information about where the targets live and work. But there’s still euphoria, if you click on the link at the top to Tiller the Killer Aborted!
Rafflaw:
Stick with him all you want, he is a hack economist.
It is not bold at all to call a Nobel Laureate a hack, if he indeed is one.
Barrack Obama receiving a peace prize is an indication of the politicization of the prize. I have no assurance the Nobel prize is non-partisan after that charade. So I can make my assertion with assurance that Paul Krugman is a hack and a second rate economist.
Krugman is a warmed over Keynesian and not very tasty at that.
The dollar should be pegged to a store of value, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, nickle and other metals used in industry have such value. The value is self-regulating and inflation is not possible as it is with fiat money.
Exactly.
Tony C,
To paraphrase Buddha, the goal is persecution, not prosecution.
@Slart: What more of a connection is necessary before we should attempt to marginalize violent hate speech in our politics today?
I haven’t been reading, so it depends on what you mean by “marginalize.” I hate hate speech, but I don’t want to pass a law against it. I believe (and I think the founders believed) in some absolutes, because I feel certain that if exceptions are made, exceptions become the rule. To rephrase that for clarity, as soon as we outlaw something as “violent” speech, politicians will start characterizing everything they don’t like us saying as “violent speech.”
The natural language of contests is by its nature violent speech. You try to kill the other team, destroy them, break the back of the competition, whatever. Competition always uses the metaphors of war and death and domination by force, of conquering by force.
Marginalize all you want in a non-legal sense. I’ll sign the boycott of FOX advertisers, whoever they are. Just don’t give the government the power to punish people for over-the-top rhetoric.
You are on fire today Elaine!
shano,
Hoolier-than-thou-igans?
Why is it when Palin gets involved, people end up being shouted at by hooligans?
My Democratic congresswoman who was defeated by a Teabagger in November:
Former Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick couldn’t help but think “that could have happened to us,” when she learned the horrifying news that a gunman shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others during a “meet and greet” at a Tucson grocery store Jan. 8.
Kirkpatrick was conducting an identical event at a Holbrook store in August 2009 when a crowd became increasingly angry that she was talking to constituents one-on-one instead of conducting a town hall that everyone could hear.
As the anger escalated Kirkpatrick walked away from the event, and a video recording of her walking away was used against her in the 2010 election she lost to Republican Congressman Paul Gosar.
“It (the Tucson massacre) sheds another light on that situation,” Kirkpatrick said Monday during a visit to Prescott. “That could have happened to us. I think every member of Congress had that feeling.”
Still, she thought the Tucson shooting was an isolated event and said she wouldn’t do anything differently if she were still in office, despite receiving more than one death threat herself while in office.
Other state, county, municipal and school officials who represent this region echoed her comments (see related story).
“I didn’t feel threatened, but I felt like it was a situation that could get out of hand,” Kirkpatrick said. “There was a lot of yelling.”
Kirkpatrick cancelled subsequent meet-and-greet events she had planned. “At that time, the rhetoric was so heated I felt like emotions needed to temper a little bit,” she said. Federal officials reported an increase in threats as the health care debate heated up.
Also like Giffords, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin targeted Kirkpatrick’s 1st Congressional District with a bull’s-eye on a map during the 2010 election. While that upset her family members, Kirkpatrick said it didn’t make her fearful. “I guess I thought that this was her way of expressing herself,” Kirkpatrick said of the bull’s-eye.
Like Giffords two years earlier, Kirkpatrick left the Arizona Legislature to run for Congress. Having served with Giffords in the Legislature, she asked Giffords for advice on her campaign. “You better get some comfy shoes,” Giffords quipped.
Kirkpatrick also knew Chief U.S. District Judge John Rolls, who was killed during the Tucson rampage. She was one of his law clerks in 1976-83 when he was a Pima County prosecutor. She remembers how he would take the time to hang out and talk with the “lowly” law clerks. “Both Gabby and John were just very giving of their time and talents to young people,” Kirkpatrick said. “Gabby is just a genuinely good person who cares about her constituents.
“John was an outstanding trial attorney and a man of the highest integrity, and always humble.
“He was definitely the type of guy who would stop by to say hello,” as he did to Giffords while shopping Jan. 8.
Kirkpatrick attended the Jan. 12 memorial for the shooting victims as well as Roll’s rosary.
Noting that she used to sit with Republicans during the State of the State and State of the Union addresses, Kirkpatrick said she hopes the tragedy will lead to more civility in D.C.
Some members of Congress are proposing that Republicans and Democrats sit side-by-side at the president’s upcoming State of the Union address.
Chan,
With all due respect, calling a Nobele Laureate a “hack” seems a little bold to me. Some of his research and expertise is in the area of how gold standards impacted past world wide recessions and depressions. You can certaintly diaagree with him and call him wrong, but a hack? If you don’t mind, as I mentioned earlier, I will stick with Prof. Krugman.
Another case :
Jim Sleeper has some insights into whether a “monstrous crime” always “stands on its own.” He recalls a connection he once made between “the 1993 shooting rampage of deranged black loner Colin Ferguson against 25 white Long island Rail Road passengers, six of whom died, and a black radio station, WLIB”:
Ferguson was an avid listener to the station, whose morning talk show hosts were spewing so much racial bile at that time, including metaphorical death threats against white journalists, that Nat Hentoff wrote station owner Percy Sutton to ask if he’d ever thought what would happen if some deranged loner took the rhetoric seriously. Sutton didn’t respond and the rhetoric rolled on…
In 1985, the black poet Julius Lester noted presciently, nine years before Colin Ferguson shot those commuters, that violent rhetoric such as Louis Farrakhan’s at that time was “subtly but surely creating an atmosphere in America where hatreds of all kinds will be easier to express openly, and one day, in some as yet unknown form, those hatreds will ride commuter trains into the suburbs. By then it will be too late for us all.”
(Lester’s comments and mine are on the second item on the pdf I’ve linked here.)
Ferguson’s deed underscored the extra-legal truth that — again — some psychotics are tuned in more acutely than the rest of us to a society’s subliminal signals and that, if those undercurrents of fear and hatred are surfaced by impresarios of ethno-racial grievance, the deranged may be only the first to act on them. That truth was also bared in the lethal rage of former Brooklyn resident Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer on the West Bank only months after Ferguson’s rampage.
Sarah Palin is comparable to radio station WLIB.
From John Arivosis:
Seriously, she was out of the new for, what, 4 days and she just couldn’t take it anymore. So Ms. Me Me Me decided to defend her use of the term “blood libel,” hoping that it might get another round of news going. And it did. Particularly since Palin insisted she knew the definition of blood libel, then went ahead and poorly defined it. Then again, English isn’t her first language (Palin doesn’t really have one). Andy Barr at Politico:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin insisted Monday that she did know the definition of, and correctly used, the term “blood libel” in recently striking back at her critics.
“Blood libel obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands,” Palin said in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity.
Actually, it’s much more than that. It’s a historic and defamatory slur on an entire group of people, meant to demean, and even more, dehumanize them. It’s not simply being falsely accused of having blood on your hands, otherwise anyone falsely accused of a crime could claim “blood libel,” and that’s not what it means by any stretch.
But I suppose if you’re not that bright, mock education, have never properly mastered the English language, and use phrases that your speechwriter gives you without really knowing what they mean, or having any notion of the history behind them (does anyone seriously believe that Palin knew the history of the phrase – please), then yes, you might be confused about the meaning and usage of “blood libel.” And that’s why you shouldn’t use phrases you don’t understand.
(And for added ME ME ME benefit, Palin goes on to criticize the memorial service the President attended, calling it a “pep rally.” That’s right, continue to mock the dead, Ms. Palin. Great way to bring the country together.)
Related
Bob,
I’m fighting a cold right now and don’t really feel like fighting you (or anyone else) as well so I’ll restrict my response to the significant part of your post. As Buddha is arguing the point I would make far more cogently than I currently could, just assume that I’m following all of his posts with “What he said.” (you can do the same for shano as well).
As for the important stuff: Do you live in New York? If so, do they still have the ‘Nobody beats the Wiz’ ads with Joe Namath? It’s been almost 2 decades since I lived in Manhattan, but I always found it oddly comforting that Broadway Joe was still a major endorser in the New York market…
Well, maybe just one salvo…
Bob and Tony C:
As the level of violent rhetoric in civic discourse increases so does the probability of an unstable person (regardless of ideology or lack thereof) committing or attempting to commit a violent act (it also has other negative effects worth fighting). What more of a connection is necessary before we should attempt to marginalize violent hate speech in our politics today?
But the political atmosphere that included the lax regulation of guns in the state of Arizona and the cutting of mental health care services here by 50% in the past two years is not political?
Everything about this is touched by politics in one way or the other.
I guess you just have to live in Palin country to understand the atmosphere of hate that she encourages and nurtures.
Bob Esq.:
Fiat money is money printed by government. Gold and silver have a value in themselves.
Gold and silver have a store of value and must be produced by mining and smelting so there is somewhat of a limit set on the low end of it’s value. I.e., if it costs more to produce than it is worth there is going to be no gold and silver production until the price rises to the point where it is profitable.
Governments can print money with no concern for value. And so we have TARP, Stimulus and inflation because of TARP and Stimulus. Gold and silver as money set or should set a limit on government creating money out of thin air and debasing our money.
Inflation is nothing but a tax on our labor.
Or at least that is my take on it. I think, in a sane world, Paul Krugman would be called a hack and not some economic “expert”.
But then sound money isn’t necessarily a right wing idea so it would be hard to say that Loughner was influenced by the right. I think you would probably need a couple of ideas to say for sure.
I am OK with some things that are considered left so according to Buddha’s line of thinking, it would be left wing propaganda that caused me to commit mass murder if I ever did (which I wouldn’t).
So back to Loughner as a lunatic.
Bob,
“IF the NY Times were asked to prove its case by a preponderance of the evidence — it would lose. Tossing around concepts like a salad does not a case make.”
How many times do I have to say this isn’t a court case before it sinks in? I’ve said it time and again and you keep coming back with legal standards of proof like preponderance of the evidence. You do understand the difference between “prosecute” and “persecute”, right? Then you should understand the difference in light of their application in anti-propaganda.
As to the Secret Service, your blind deference to authority (?) is keeping you from realizing that maybe, just maybe, they have a vested interest in not saying shooters have political motivations. Taking them without a grain of salt is not wise. Not very tasty either as salty is a primary taste, but I digress.
If you want to talk about Obama being Bush Lite? I have no problem with that. I was an early critic of Obama’s weaseling and with continue to be so. His proclamation about assassinations merits him being excoriated every damn day and a place in history right next to the villain Bush. Not just for reasons of sequence either.
However, that does no alleviate that you are ignoring how memes work and that the shooter was repeating right wing memes – their violent content or lack thereof notwithstanding. Memes act like a virus. He had been exposed. If he caught one? He could have caught others – declared or not.
@Bob,Esq: I haven’t been reading this thread, but in these last comments I think you are correct; even MSNBC is saying there is no reliable evidence Loughner was a right wing fanatic. It is possible Loughner is mentally ill and obsessed over something that is technically political (e.g. monetary policy, the federal reserve, fear of the government controlling people) without having any recognizable allegiance to the left or right. Supposedly his visit to Gifford’s office two years ago was to rant about government control of “grammar.” Apparently, he still had in his residence a form letter from Gifford’s office thanking him for his visit; along with a standard PR picture of Gifford.
I don’t much care what insane logic drove Loughner to murder; he could have been taking orders from a goldfish for all we know.
Buddha,
IF the NY Times were asked to prove its case by a preponderance of the evidence — it would lose. Tossing around concepts like a salad does not a case make.
Seeing they are experts on the topic, should the Secret Service conclude that Loughner was influenced by the right wing rhetoric of the likes of Palin, Angle, etc., then I’ll buy everything you’re selling. Till then…
Let’s talk about Obama adopting the tyrannical policies of Bush and his spineless two-faced supporters that excuse him for it.
Blouise,
I am glad someone saw my attempt at humor as humor!
“Plus if Jared Loughner is for it, I am against it.”(rafflaw)
quiet chuckle