Blood libel

I pulled this off a website to read:

In saying her critics "manufactured a blood libel," Sarah Palindeployed a phrase linked to the false accusations made for centuries against Jews, often to malign them as child murderers who coveted the blood of Christian children.

Blood libel has been a central fable of anti-Semitism in which Jews have been accused of using the blood of gentile children for medicinal purposes or to mix in with matzo, the unleavened bread traditionally eaten at Passover.

The spreading of the blood libel dates back to the Middle Ages — and perhaps even further — and those allegations have led to massacres of Jewish communities for just as long.

The term "blood libel" carries particular power in the Jewish community, though it has taken on other shades of meaning. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that "while the term 'blood libel' has become part of the English parlance to refer to someone being falsely accused, we wish that Palin had used another phrase, instead of one so fraught with pain in Jewish history."

What I see here is that Foxman wants to distance himself and his people from Palin; one can hardly blame him. It is laughable when powerful people purporting to be such independent thinkers, sporting deer rifles and talking about their toughness and strength reach back for tea and sympathy from the public when they are falsely accused or maligned by the media.

By comparing herself to the jews, Palin is drawing on a new victimhood in conservative christianity. Many evangelical christians bathe in the martyrdom of a perceived persecution by the society they live in. They often preach Paul's comforting words: be in the world, not of the world. But most of us christians are not exactly persecuted. It is pretty easy being part of the moral majority these days, but for many evangelicals, it is a rallying point to see yourself as under attack by the worldly forces.

This is the kind of picture Palin and her advisors want to paint by referring to a blood libel. If they can get us to see her as a victim of the very prejudices we liberals decry as immoral, we lose our moral high ground. Of course, if we see it for what it is, we can see that Palin shares in the guilt of false accusations and persecutions of her detractors.