Posts Tagged ‘blood libel’

Gregg Opelka

The Word Community Speaks Out on Tucson Shooting: Ban Stupidity, Not Us

by Gregg Opelka

After watching the spectacle of blame unfold during the days following the tragic January 8th Tucson shootings, one angry community is no longer biting its tongue. Saying it will no longer be victimized by political opportunists on the left, the Word community has finally broken its long taciturnity.

An estimated 5,000 very upset words held a rally today in the plaza directly across from the national headquarters of the American Library Association at 50 E. Huron Street in Chicago. The keynote speakers of the group—which calls itself Words of Wisdom (WOW)—were WOW President, the Honorable word Reason, and Vice-President and WOW Founder, the Venerable word Ridiculous.

Reason—a bespectacled old word with a long gray beard—took the podium first. “This just doesn’t make any sense,” argued the six-letter noun.

“Not only is there no demonstrable nexus between the demented shooter and the Tea Party or Sarah Palin, there’s absolutely no proof that the curtailment of free speech will result in fewer crimes of this sort in the future. Civility is nice, my fellow Words—but liberty is nicer.”

The crowd—many of them prepositions, conjunctions, or mere adverbs who came out of a sense of semantic solidarity—cheered in enthusiastic support. “Wooooohoooo!” screamed Exclamation from the back. “Save free speech!” hollered Indignation. “Screw the frickin’ censors!” Vulgarity bellowed.

After Reason’s opening statement, Ridiculous made her way to the podium. Clad in a Lady Gaga meat-dress and light fur, once she opened her mouth, Ridiculous—thankfully—did not live up to her name.

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Charles C. Johnson

In Praise of Alan Dershowitz: Is He America’s Last Honest Liberal?

by Charles C. Johnson

This past week’s “blood libel” comment from Sarah Palin brought forth the seeming unlikeliest of defenders, Alan Dershowitz, who, in an exclusive to Big Government, defended the former governor’s comments from her obsessed detractors.

Conservatives are justifiably pleased that their erstwhile foe has become their ally on this. They think that maybe the spirit of civil in our politics really is happening and we need look no further than Professor Dershowitz.

But to those of us who know Professor Dershowitz well, it is par for the course for Professor Dershowitz is a national treasure. He is perhaps America’s last honest liberal – and a genuine friend of America’s only real ally in the Middle East, Israel. I hope what I am writing here should finally put to rest any lingering doubts that conservatives have about him.

A couple of examples will illustrate my point:

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Rob  Miller

A ‘Comparison Of Two Speeches’..Really?

by Rob Miller

The latest dinosaur media meme involves a comparison of two speeches given within hours of one another on the Tucson shootings- Sarah Palin’s video and President Barack Obama’s in a Tucson Basketball stadium.

Obama’s speech is lauded as showing him to be ‘a formidable figure’,'unifying a nation in its grief’, ‘conciliatory’ and ‘calling for anew era of civility in American politics’.

Sarah Palin’s is branded as ‘a missed opportunity’, ‘defiant’, symptomatic of ‘grievance-based’ and ‘urgent and defensive’.

I can appreciate why Sarah Palin’s political enemies would want to compare these two speeches..but it’s an exercise in absurdity.

No one accused President Barack Obama of being directly complicit in mass murder, and no one in Sarah Palin’s camp orchestrated a campaign to do so. If they had, we might have heard a very different speech from one of the most thin-skinned presidents in modern times.

It was not President Obama who was receiving death threats from the right calling for ‘payback’ for the Tucson murders, and no one suggested that the killings were ‘Obama’s fault’.

President Obama was in Tucson to conduct a memorial service for the victims, and he did so.

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Joel B. Pollak

From Blood Libel to Lynching

by Joel B. Pollak

Palin-haters are attempting to turn Gov. Sarah Palin’s reasonable and empathic response today to the Tucson atrocity into an antisemitic outburst.

Palin, like Glenn Reynolds (and, independently, Andrew Breitbart) used the term “blood libel” to describe the way in which opportunistic politicians and journalists seized on the shooting spree to demonize the Tea Party and conservatives in general.

The original “blood libel” is the false accusation (originating in medieval Europe, still repeated in the Arab world) that Jews murder non-Jewish children for ritual purposes, a claim used throughout history to incite hatred and sometimes violence against Jewish communities.

Some conservatives–including Reynolds, Gov. Palin, Breitbart, and others–are suggesting that today’s media climate, in which millions of people are being falsely accused of complicity in the Tucson murders simply because of their belief in limited government, has analogous features. (Charles Krauthammer used the term “libel” today in the Washington Post, without the additional word “blood,” and it is possible that he intended to imply similar metaphor, albeit less directly.)

Of course, the Jews of medieval Europe who were the victims of the blood libel did not have the political freedom that Americans enjoy today, and which we conservatives are using to defend ourselves. That is such an obvious difference that no one felt it necessary to make the point when using the analogy–which, like any analogy, is inexact and open to debate.

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Pamela Geller

A Conspiracy Against the Mind, Against Life, Against Man–and the Virtue of Sarah Palin

by Pamela Geller

Wednesday Sarah Palin responded to the vicious blood libel leveled against her and millions of right-thinking Americans by the army of destroyers. The ferocious, relentless attacks on Sarah Palin are a testament to her greatness, proof of how deathly afraid of her they are, like Dracula to the silver cross.

It’s envy. Ayn Rand said it: “Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves….That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.”

Here’s the thing. The mission, by objective, of the haters, the party of destruction, is to ruin the best, the brightest, the good. The left has, day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, trafficked only in ruin and destruction, focusing on the most effective leaders on the right.

Name one, one, Republican president the voluntary-state-run media has liked. Forget liked, has given a fair shake? Name one Republican they supported. The only Republican the media can cotton to is a RINO (Republican In Name Only) or one who is sure to lose (i.e. old, middle of the road RINO McCain).

I refuse to accept that Palin is unelectable. Says who? Those who wish to destroy her. We, on the right, must learn from our enemies. Not their evil, but in their strategy. They stand by their people no matter how egregious their crime — the Barney Franks, Barney Franks, Bill Clintons blah blah blah.

We, on the other hand, cut and run when the lie about whomever has gone around the world, before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. I cringe when I hear conservatives and Republicans say that Palin is not electable. Why? Because evildoers said so? Who cares? That’s what they want you to think. How wonderful it would be to have a clear thinking, rational, proud patriot for president. Who else could possibly restore America back to her standing and respect in the world? I think Palin would be spectacular, one of the greats.

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Publius

Exclusive: Alan Dershowitz Defends Sarah Palin’s Use of Term ‘Blood Libel’

by Publius

In an exclusive statement, famed attorney and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz defended Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” from multiple detractors. As the Media Matters/MSM/Democrat narrative on the Tucson tragedy unravels, they are getting a lot more desperate in their attacks on Palin. Fortunately, there are still plenty of honest liberals around:

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. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

Pamela Geller

Victory! Seattle Transit Drops Jewish Blood Libel Bus Ads

by Pamela Geller

Antisemitism is coming into fashion again, and anti-Israel bus ads had been set to start running on twelve buses in Seattle this Monday. The ads featured the hateful slogan, “Israeli War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work.” But two days after my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, announced that we would be running king-sized pro-Israel ads on Seattle buses to counter their hate ads, King County Metro Transit folded: Transit officials issued a statement Thursday saying that they would be refusing the anti-Israel, antisemitic ads. They were “changing their policy.”

The annihilationist bus ads were rejected!

Bus jewhate

It was a bad day for Nazis and Jew-haters, and a huge victory for all lovers of freedom.

The AFDI ads were singular and hard-hitting: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Islamic jihad,” and “One Billion Dollars to Hamas. Your Tax Dollars at Work.”

Bus 2

And this one:

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Pamela Geller

Barack Obama’s Anti-Semitic Website

by Pamela Geller

During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s website, Organizing for America – over which Obama has editorial control — played host to a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces. It was overwhelming. There were numerous, heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it is happening again, right now, on the official website of the man who is supposedly the leader of the free world.

ObamaLogo

The site was and is closely policed. The site moderators remove material that they consider to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.” What they find disrespectful can be interesting: once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s website consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book, Dreams of my Father. Obama’s team did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, and so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in just under 36 hours. That’s right, Barack Obama’s website banned Obama’s own words. But the most disgusting anti-semitic ravings remained on the site, along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.

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