Sarah Palin's use of "blood libel" is not only inappropriate and offensive, as Jewish groups across the nation are pointing out. It's also part of a deliberate right wing strategy to stake claim to all of the terminology used to describe the oppressive systems that the right supports, and to turn those words around in order to claim that the oppressors are the "real" victims.
Media Matters has a nice summary of the right wing's support for Palin's outrageous claim that criticism of her violent rhetoric and imagery amounts to "blood libel." Other DK diarists have been writing about Palin's use of the term, but I'd like to expand the discussion into a more general critique of right wing language and its impact.
The far right has targeted the term "blood libel" for appropriation -- they want to use it to describe their own alleged victimization. "Blood libel" describes a crime historically committed against Jews -- lies told about Jewish behavior (sacrificing Christian babies, etc.) that were deliberately intended to foment Christian rage, and that frequently resulted in pogroms in which Jews were murdered. Antisemitism is associated with the far right about as closely as racism and sexism (which means that it's as close and dear as an infant's security blanket), so one can safely assume that the right doesn't use the term from any sense of solidarity with the Jewish people. Instead, they use the term to displace Jewish suffering, and to cloak themselves in the rhetoric of the victim.
For all their hysteria about alleged left wing "victimology" (a term invented by the right to discredit left-wing studies of oppressive power), nobody plays the victim like the far right. They're the same people who brought you the term "reverse racism," and for exactly the same reason. They have no sympathy for people of color who are victims of racism -- in fact, they usually support and advocate racist policies. Right wing adoption of the term "reverse racism" is all about displacing the real victims of racism, while simultaneously pretending to be suffering at the hands of people of color.
Similarly, the right loves to claim to be a victim of feminism, coining the term "Feminazi" and lingering lovingly over singular and rare false accusations of rape as evidence that men are being oppressed by women when virtually every statistic shows women are measurably disadvantaged in most economic, political and social arenas. In the right's eyes, homosexuals are "attacking" marriage, merely by wanting to get married. Gay men and women are "destroying" the Armed Forces by serving their country honorably. The rallying cry of the right is that they must "defend" so-called "American values." They portray themselves as a community under siege, the "real American" victims of some vast leftist conspiracy led by their fantasy of a socialist Black Muslim Kenyan President hell-bent on subjugating and enslaving God-fearing white Christian Americans.
Despite its absurd excesses -- or perhaps because of them -- right wing rhetorical strategy has been largely successful in undermining progressive efforts to critique inequity and to describe oppressive power structures. In fact, the right has fostered a climate in which being called a racist or a sexist is now somehow more awful and more deserving of sympathy than being a victim of racism or sexism -- a view that is no longer confined to the far right, but has spread, like a disease, even to many progressives. And this is the danger of allowing the right to appropriate the terminology of ethnic, racial, and gendered suffering -- the power of our words is twisted or shattered, and we are bereft of terminology to describe the problems we see before us.
At this point in time, when we're forcibly struck by the awful inappropriateness of Palin's use of "blood libel" as a defensive manouever, we have the opportunity to think not only about this particular appropriation, but the general pattern of appropriation in which the right engages. It gives us a chance to question ourselves, and our own use of language. We can and should ask ourselves how much of the right's framing we've unconsciously endorsed by our adoption of their terminology, and, as a community, we should endeavor to purge ourselves of those rhetorical borrowings at the same time that we re-affirm our progressive beliefs and goals. It's not enough to eschew inflammatory and divisive language -- we need to reclaim the clear and expressive language that the right attempts to strip from us.
Because I assure you, "blood libel" is not going away any time soon. The right is staking a claim to ownership and unless we're careful, four or five years from now, we progressives may find that word phrase erupting in our internecine battles, just as we find the right's framing of racism and sexism erupting in current intra-left arguments.