Bizarre, Politics, Society

Palin: Attacks on Conservatives Over Tucson Massacre Constitute “Blood Libel”

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

598 thoughts on “Palin: Attacks on Conservatives Over Tucson Massacre Constitute “Blood Libel””

  1. @shano: I can’t watch the video from work; but I think Beck is just interested in getting rich no matter who he hurts, endangers, gets killed or whatever.

    I disagree on the right wing vs. left wing debate. There are no wings in this building, there is one hall, and it is the corporate hall. The number of actual, true blue liberal democrats in the House or Senate is (IMO) in the single-digit percentages.

    Do not forget it was Obama (to whom I donated several hundred dollars, and voted for in both primary and general) that gutted the public option in his first closed door meeting with the for-profit hospital, pharmaceutical, and doctor’s lobbies. It was Obama that promised the pharmas we wouldn’t allow reimportation of drugs.

    It is our supposed liberal Democrats that now demonize the left wing, that cave in on tax cuts, that are talking about gutting social security, that have enthusiastically supported bills that strip our rights, bail out corporations and banks to the tune of trillions while screwing the elderly, the unemployed, and on and on. They don’t do that because they are weak-kneed or because they are bad negotiators or because they just don’t know how to stand up, they do it because they want the same thing as Republicans do: The money of the wealthy and the favors of the corporations.

    I could go on ad nauseum, but IMO if anybody in the bottom 99% thinks one of these parties (Democrats or Republicans) is “on their side,” they are delusional.

  5. Right is Right,
    The Right has been at war with the middle class for quite some time now. At least since Reagan first reduced the taxes on the wealthy and attacked unions. As to the use of weapons, it seems that shano has pretty well documented that they have already started shooting at and bombing or planning on bombing the Left already.

  6. Shano:

    that was a cartoon. How do I know the guy that made it didn’t edit various clips to create the video.

    But if he said shoot a Marxist in the head, I would have to disagree with him.

    Oh well, all this is only leading to civil war. We should probably split the country and go our separate ways before we get to that point.

  7. @shano: (IMO) The reason they are fans of Palin and Beck is that they correctly perceive something is wrong with our government (it is) and they are too dumb to realize Palin and Beck (and other right wing and religious groups) are just exploiting them for good ol’ cash, and because they are dumb, they are much quicker to resort to violence as a corrective.

    In other words (IMO) the problem isn’t Palin and Beck, the problem is that the system is corrupt and broken and taken over by the wealthy and the corporations that completely own Congress, the courts and the White House. The problem is this country is dividing by class into a plutocracy and corpocracy. We have a political class immune from law, a wealthy class nearly so, and anybody outside that 1% is living in a police state with ever diminishing rights.

    Everybody can see us sliding into a police state without rights, right here on Turley’s blog. The poor and dumb feel the effects the worst because they are the most likely to get screwed by the corporations. To lose their jobs, have their pensions ripped off, lose their homes, or otherwise get fucked with no recourse. So Palin and Beck and their fellow sociopaths have figured out how to make money off the anger of poor dumb citizenry; but the reason there are angry dumb citizens is not the fault of Palin and Beck: They are a side effect. The root of the problem is the corruption of the politicians, and the fact that our electoral system offers no recourse. (IMO).

  8. All these radical groups the white supremacists, the anti abortion groups the ‘sovereign citizens’ the Militiamen and the Minutemen et al, are fans of Sarah Palin and/or Beck, Rush, Hannity.
    All of them.

    Hah, Elaine, Stephen Colbert nailed it!

  9. When is it going to become a crisis? How many more?

    Another Isolated Incident

    by digby

    Luckily incomplete this time:

    A backpack bomb with the potential of killing or injuring dozens of people was found Monday along the route of a Martin Luther King Day “unity march” in downtown Spokane, Wash., authorities said today.

    “It was a device that clearly was intended to harm or kill people,’’said Frank Harrill, a senior FBI agent and spokesman for the bureau’s Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force.

    The FBI posted a $20,000 reward Tuesday and released three photographs, including one of the black Swiss-Army backpack that contained the destructive device.

    Harrill would not discuss the type of explosive or its construction, including whether the backpack contained an explosive shield intended to spray shrapnel toward potential victims. He also declined to say if the device was intended to be detonated remotely or by a timer.

    “It was set to detonate during a unity march on the King Holiday, so, obviously it had political or social overtones,’’ Harrill said.

    I keep hearing that there has been no political violence over the past two years and that it’s terribly unfair to keep claiming that paranoid, right wing conspiracy talk has anything to do with anything. Earlier today, I saw Gary Hart have to turn his comments against violent rhetoric into an abstraction, explaining that he meant that something will happen in the future.

    Nobody on television seems to know about this, to which we may very well be adding yesterday’s averted bombing of a Martin Luther King parade. (I’m just going to keep posting it in hopes that somehow it will get out into the ether)

    — July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America,” walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

    — October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

    — December 2008: A pair of “Patriot” movement radicals — the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted “to attack the political infrastructure” — threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

    — December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

    — January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

    — February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

    — April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

    — April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama’s purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

    — May 2009: A “sovereign citizen” named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

    — June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

    — February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one “domestic terrorism” too.)

    — March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.

    — March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.

    — May 2010: A “sovereign citizen” from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.

    — May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.

    — May 2010: Two “sovereign citizens” named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.

    — July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.

    — September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year–old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the “Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

  11. shano,
    Well done. The Right can’t stop what they have created or nutured. These wack jobs keep their “base” all riled up,but who cares what satchels or backpacks they behind in the street. I am very interested to find out who left this latest bomb. It was obviously meant to do damage to marchers at the MLK parade so the Right won’t be able to claim that it wasn’t political.

  12. I would like Right is Right or any other Fox viewer to comment on this video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFohJmoiJHU

    Is this the future you envision for America…….why does this obviously insane man have a television show?
    And if you are a Fox viewer, why dont you write the station about this sort of hate speech?

  13. And I do not think the Republicans or the right wing should be so complacent about this.
    Because a Palinite Teabagger could ‘target’ their moderate GOP congressperson next.

  14. Well, I am glad to have an honest debate here about this. Because when your favored candidate in any election
    has to stop having public meetings on the campaign trail because of the Palinites inciting people to violence and bad behavior,
    there is something seriously wrong in America that needs to be addressed!

  16. shano,

    In case I haven’t said it before? Good job. Keep up the quality posts.

  18. Sorry, above to be corrected: “culture war BEING waged AGAINST the left and the political demonization of Obama I don’t have any faith that last weeks SHOOTING is the end of it by any means.”

    If I’m tired but can’t get to sleep I should probably not try to type 🙂 Insomnia takes it’s toll…

  19. Shano, your last two postings were quite correct. Between the rabid culture war beig waged by the left and the political demonization of Obama I don’t have any faith that last weeks shoting is the end of it by any means. A bomb was found along the MLK parade route yesterday in Seattle and Randall Terry is back at it:

    “Activist Vows Graphic Anti-Abortion Ads During Super Bowl

    “I want to pummel Obama,” Terry told the network. “I despise this presidency. He is the arch child killer of the Western Hemisphere, so I’m going to go head-to-head with him.”

    Terry has launched a website which features three videos described as “prototype ads for Super Bowl 2012.” One ad compares abortion to “slavery, child labor [and] segregation” and features images of fetuses juxtaposed against images of lynchings of black people and images of the Holocaust.”

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/crusaders-run-obama-super-bowl-ad-ploy/

  20. What we really want is a media AND a Congress that works with real information instead of spouting off right wing nonsense and lies, simply because the source may have a following:

    Monday on Fox News, Beck claimed that President Obama gave $2 billion to the Brazilian state-run oil company PetroBras “just days” after conservative boogeyman George Soros strengthened his investment in the company.
    The very next evening, the two Republican congressmen repeated Beck’s baseless charge on the House floor. While criticizing the moratorium on offshore drilling brought on by the Gulf oil spill, Rep. Burton said that “we just sent $2 billion to Brazil so they can do offshore drilling.” Moments later, Burton parroted Beck’s fantasy version of events: “We don’t need to be sending Mr. Soros money in Brazil so he can make more money by doing offshore drilling with our taxpayers’ money.”

    This whole thing was conspiratorial lunacy, by the way, completely untrue. As were the Beck conspiracy rants that explicitly inspired these acts of violence.

    “It’s not there aren’t paranoid, violent left wing conspiracy nuts out there. Of course there are. But their ideas are not being mainstreamed into the general population the same way the right’s are and that’s because the paranoid left doesn’t have their own media. Also the politicians on the left don’t listen to them and believe what they say. They don’t even listen to the mainstream left.

    You can’t legislate this, of course. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to spout off ludicrous bullshit. But it’s probably a good idea to at least try to draw attention to the loonier stuff, even though you will be descended upon by a bunch of shrieking harpies the minute you bring it up. Certainly the mainstream media could do a better job of filtering this nonsense out.

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