Sarah Palin defended herself today from charges that her gunsights map had prompted Jared Loughner to go on his shooting spree in Tucson. In a video release she said, among other things,
"Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn."
Well. The term blood libel is a highly-charged one. Its historical meaning has been the false charge that "The Jews" murder Christian children and use their blood in rituals. As you might expect, this has caused even more of an uproar than her continued silence about the shootings might have.
The guy that injected the phrase into the current political debate seems to have been Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), in a column he wrote on Monday for the WSJ. I suspect that Palin's speechwriters thought it sounded good and "borrowed" it from there.
I've come to expect very little intelligence from anyone working for La Palin, but I'd have thought a law professor at Tennessee would have known better than to use a phrase which has caused enormous anguish to Jews for the better part of five hundred years.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 12, 2011 10:50 AM | TrackBack