Sarah Palin’s on-line video defending herself for her over the top words and postings rather than calling for a period of less rhetoric and more unification of our nation was PATHETIC and REPREHENSIBLE.
Back on November 18, 2009 I called Sarah Palin a fruitcake. I am sorry I wrote that. It was an insult to fruitcake. I believe Sarah Palin’s ambition to become president of the United States will never materialize. Doyle McManus’ opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times seems to agree with me. Her defense of her words and actions means that Barack Obama may have a worthwhile G.O.P. candidate running against him in 2012.
As much as I consider Barack Obama a poor choice for president, he is beyond a doubt superior to Sarah Palin.
I had never heard the words “blood libel” until she used them. I had to search for the meaning. I know of the accusations that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in cooking and that such stories still exist in 2011. What that nonsense has to do with accusations that Palin’s words and actions incite people to murderous actions escapes me. Is she relating herself to the Jews who were murdered by their Christian neighbors during the Middle Ages?
As to watching the video, you can find it elsewhere on the net. I won’t waste the space here. I hope that the news media simply stops reporting on Sarah Palin. They are to blame for her rise in public awareness.
For those who may be interested here is a history of ‘blood libel’ I have scanned the following from the Los Angeles Times.
In saying her critics “manufactured a blood libel,” Sarah Palin deployed a phrase linked to the false accusations made for centuries against Jews, often to malign them as child-killers 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 to the Middle Ages – and perhaps earlier – 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 events 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.”
One of the first recorded tragedies attributed to blood libel occurred in the 12th century, when a boy named William in Norwich, England, was found dead with stab wounds. Local Jews were accused of killing the child in a ritual fashion and, according to several histories on religion, most of the Jewish population there was subsequently wiped out.
Such charges continued for centuries, with Jews often assigned blame in the unsolved killings of children. Many of the dead children were considered martyrs; several were elevated to sainthood by the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches.
Allegations of blood libel spread during the Holocaust and persist today.
-RICK ROJAS
Coast Contact 