This is not just another scandal, or joke, or gaffe. Sarah Palin and John McCain are inciting violence, against Barack Obama and any of the millions of Americans who support his campaign. Anyone who is familiar with the recent history of Israel, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist, will recognize the pattern. We must take this seriously, and make our protest against the McCain-Palin incitement to violence heard, before it is too late.
Sarah Palin's new punchline is calling Barack Obama a ""pal of terrorists."
It is easy to laugh, and to see this as yet another example of Sarah Palin's astonishing lack of knowledge and/or conscience--and it is that. But it's no laughing matter.
The United States is engaged in a "Global War On Terror."
Our policy--as advocated by Barack Obama as well as his opponents--is to attack not only terrorists, but states or organizations who harbor and support them.
In Virginia, you can see many license plates bearing the slogan "Fight Terror."
So it's very clear what Sarah Palin means when she calls Barack Obama a friend of terrorists. She's calling him an enemy. She's calling him a target. She's calling him someone who needs to be "taken out."
Don't kid yourselves. This is direct incitement to violence against Barack Obama, and against the millions of Americans who support his campaign to be our President.
In Israel, in the early 1990s, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin faced similar accusations from the extreme Right, after he achieved a historic breakthrough and started the first-ever official Israeli negotiations with the PLO. The incitement came from above and below. It began with politicians in Israel's parliament using the exact same words--calling Rabin a "friend of terrorists." It continued with crowds of right-wing demonstrators, seething with hatred, chanting "Rabin is a traitor" and waving images of Rabin in Arab headdress and Nazi uniform. And it ended with a right-wing extremist assassinating Yitzhak Rabin, and mortally wounding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Make no mistake, people.
Think of the lies about Barack Obama that have been repeated a million times by our own homegrown American right-wing--no, not just that he will raise taxes on the middle class--that he is a brainwashed Manchurian candidate of Radical Islam, he is a Marxist, he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance, he swears on the Koran. We laugh it off because we know he's a politician, a better one than most, and about as much of a mensch as it's possible for an effective politician to be in these times. But it's no laughing matter if you believe this stuff--and some percentage of Americans do.
I go canvassing in Virginia every week. I get all kinds of responses, from enthusiastic to hostile. Most people are of course polite, whoever they're voting for, but not quite all. This Sunday, a woman screamed at me that I'm a Marxist, that Obama's a Marxist, that this is Big Brother because I have her address on a list in a computer. She ran at me, ripped my voter list out of my hands and tore it in half. "Get out of here! Go back to Washington, D.C.! Get out of my neighborhood!" She eventually stopped panting and raving, and started to ask me questions, echoing the McCain campaign's talking points. "I want to know, who is Barack Obama? Who does Barack Obama follow?"
She was terrified. She was acting as if her life was in mortal danger, because I'd knocked on her door and smiled on a Sunday afternoon.
Her sheer terror at the sight of me--a skinny Jewish guy with glasses and a ponytail in an Obama t-shirt--didn't come from nowhere. It came from months of deliberate work by Steve Schmidt and Karl Rove and Jerome Corsi and Rush Limbaugh to turn a skinny, calm, compassionate African-American guy, Barack Obama, into some kind of monster stalking horse for the Black/Muslim/Marxist reign of terror to come.
Her reaction, seething with hatred and fear like some kind of cornered animal--at the sight of another American doing normal democratic campaign volunteering--is exactly what they were working for.
Now Sarah Palin is taking this incitement to the highest level. Remember John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan because he imagined it would impress Jodie Foster? What kind of sick fantasies do you think disturbed right-wingers are cooking up to impress their new bombshell?
Sarah Palin is not just sowing division between Americans, she's inciting violence.
We need to protest to high heaven, now, loud and clear, in every form of media we've got. Not because it scores political points--we've got plenty of those already. Because even though she's not been elected to any national office yet, she's already pushing our country towards genuine disaster.