This is a terrible mistake by Democrats, and those who oppose her. There are abundant reasons why Sarah Palin is not suitable for high office, actually reprized as she delivered the speech so finely crafted as to be the antithesis of her "lock and load" style. But use of the phrase "Blood Libel" is not one of them.
While the original use of the term is the accusation of Jewish ritual slaughtering of Gentile children, terms often are widened from the specific to the general under the rubric of Semantic Change. That is why we say an army was "decimated" meaning destroyed, ignoring the root which means a the killing of ten percent of Roman soldiers as a punishment.
An analogy is in the word "Holocaust" Palin use the indefinite article "a" not "the" One can still describe destruction using the definition 2 below, without it referring to the Shoah, the slaughter of Jews under the Nazis. This is what Palin did, and is inappropriately being criticized for.
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Definition of HOLOCAUST from Merriam Webster
- a sacrifice consumed by fire
- a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire, a nuclear holocaust
3: a often capitalized : the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II —usually used with the
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I have a fairly good vocabulary, and I'm also Jewish, yet until not that long ago, I thought, as did Palin's writers, that "blood libel" was a general term meaning a lie made more severe since it was an accusation of murder. If anything I assumed it was the claim of Deicide, the killing of Christ. Blood and bloody are commonly used as intensifiers, meaning lethal violence as in the term "blood feud"
There is something else that is being overlooked in the criticism of Palin for using this term, especially from Jews. She implies that she is being accused of a blood libel. By definition a "libel" is false. She is accentuating the vileness of the lie by saying that she too being accused of it. Even if there was an intentional reference to the historical roots of the term, in this context it was a condemnation of those who perpetuated the lie, the anti-Semites, and certainly not the Jewish victims.
I tend to believe that Palin and her staff were unaware of the origin of this word, and used "blood" as an intensifier of "libel" If this had not been made into an indictment of her, the original use of the words would never have been known by the vast majority of Americans. The term would have been relegated to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
There is no way that her use of this world can fairly be seen a "dog whistle" to anti-Semites or to anyone else, as if anything it was a condemnation of such hatred. Just as the word was used in its general meaning without any furor in the Wall Street Journal, so it would have gone unnoticed when used by Palin. It is those who attempted to make her use of an arcane expression to attack her who have reminded the world just how hated Jews have been over the ages.
This is not a benefit to Democrats, and certainly not to Jews.
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For the record: While there was outrage in the comments, with especial vehemence among those who identified as Jews with I being accused of not speaking for other Jews, here's a referencethat refutes it.
The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement that, in part, came to Ms. Palin’s defense.
"It was inappropriate at the outset to blame Sarah Palin and others for causing this tragedy or for being an accessory to murder," Abraham Foxman, the group’s national director, said in a statement. "Palin has every right to defend herself against these kinds of attacks."
But Mr. Foxman added that "we wish that Palin had not invoked the phrase ‘blood-libel.’ " He called it a phrase "fraught with pain in Jewish history."
Foxman did object to the use of the term, but not in the tone that was claimed to be universal in the comments to this diary.
It turns out there is another prominent Jew, Alan Dershowitz who shares my view from this articlefrom Slate printed yesterday:
The term "blood libel" has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People,its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report.