Poor Palin, she's the victim here

Sarah Palin has responded to accusations that her fiery, aggressive and militaristic political rhetoric contributed to the weekend's shooting of a congresswoman and murder of several citizens as a 'blood libel'.

If you're not familiar with the term, it originates in two possible places: the Christian anti-semitic accusation that the Jews were collectively responsible for killing Christ or more widely, the long-held Christian belief that Jews murdered children as part of their religious rituals.

"Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."

So, not obviously a sensitive and proportionate reference. Jews were expelled, marked, murdered and discriminated against for 2000 years. Sarah used gunsights and violent metaphors to express a dislike of somebody else's politics, and is receiving some long-overdue criticism. Clearly she's just as much the victim of a lynch mob as multiple generations of Jews. Her years of incitement goes unremarked, of course.

And oh yes, Gabrielle Giffords, the injured congresswoman, is Jewish.

Palin then goes on to expound her depressing ideology:

"Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle."

Really? So Hitler bore no responsibility for the individual acts which made the Holocaust? Racist thinkers bear no responsibility for the actions of violent racists? If we follow her logic, we shouldn't be pursuing Osama Bin Laden: after all, responsibility for September 11th lies solely with the hijackers. The Taliban are clearly innocent and (as I personally feel) the Afghan people collectively are absolved of any blame and should be left alone.

On the other side of the debate, her argument implies that there is no society of any sort: that individuals are always isolated. By that logic, good deeds can never be ascribed to God, or good parenting, or social instincts. Instead, we're all alienated organisms with no social ties or responsibilities. Nobody is ever influenced by anyone else, for good or ill. There can never be any mitigation for acts: by her standards, the mentally-ill criminal is fully responsible for his behaviour, as is the starving man who steals to stay alive. Societies with collective wills, hegemonic ideologies, public debates - however they're structured - just don't exist for her.

She wants to be President of the most powerful country on earth. Oh dear.

Your murderers prove you live in the Dark Ages; our's are lone madmen

I'm finding it hard to distinguish between the murders of Salman Taseer (murdered by his own bodyguard for his liberal views on blasphemy) and the attempted murder of Gabrielle Giffords and murder of six people visiting her street meeting, at least in part for her view that the state should provide a minimum of healthcare for a minimum of people. 


Taseer's murder was greeted with jubilation by a large number of people, and with fear by those who should be speaking out. In the west, the usual neo-cons used it as evidence that Pakistanis and Muslims (not the same, remember) are fundamentally backwards. As usual, they forget Christianity and the West's millennium or so of religious and political murder on a grand scale. 


Those voices are very silent today. The talk radio hosts and rightwing bloggers aren't pointing to a dark, fundamentalist core of violent bigots at the heart of American society. They didn't mention it when Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 of his fellow citizens in Oklahoma City in 1995, nor when anti-abortionists murder patients, doctors and nurses. They're very keen to talk about 'fanatical' mullahs and preachers spreading hate in mosques, and very reluctant to consider the discourse they themselves use on the airwaves every day. 


Instead, they blame 'vicious leftwing' commentators (?) and the government: here are some delightful comments from American newspaper readers:

Unfit for the Military, unfit for Society. When the left desires to "Mainstream" scum this sort of outcome is not surprizing

Obviously, The killer was controled by a Satanic thinking. Sarah Palin had nothing to do with it. All the attacks are strictly Democrats. I think I'd rether like electing her. I'm tired of these emocrat LIARS.

Apparently the left in this country, and that includes morons like Daly and his girlfriend Lupica, were pulling out all stops to blame the right for what was essentially an act by mis-guided leftwing pothead.

alltheway - why don't you go all the way back from whence you came! are you here legally? Or are you sitting across the pond in Europe pointing your finger over here to this country? SHUT YOUR MOUTH FOREIGNER!

Once again, lefty loonies tried desperately to characterize this tragedy as the result of "hate speech", which means ANY verbal criticism of Obama or liberal democrats who are pushing their left wing communist agenda. Sorry lefties. Once again you FAIL at your brazen attempt to MUZZLE FREE SPEECH. And yes, we still HATE YOU.

Now if there would have been a conservative in the crowed they could have pulled out their concealed a blow the nutbag away and saved 6 lives and multiple injuries.

Delightful. So what am I saying? That every society has its fringe of mentally ill or simply gullible people incapable or unwilling to engage in reasoned debate. The West has certainly had long periods in which the crazies were in charge, and so has the East. The mass media - especially talk radio and rolling news has amplified their voices, because nothing gains listeners/readers/viewers like loud, extreme voices offering simple explanations (such as: all Muslims are fanatics; all Americans are fat imperialists; all infidels are condemned). It's the same for blogging and any other outlet: every time I say something complicated about politics or culture, I lose readers. When I point out that Gordon Brown looks like Henry the Green Engine, I get several hits a day for years. 

Maybe we get the politics we deserve. What a depressing thought. 

What you won't see on Sarah Palin's website this morning

After a number of people were shot dead, and a Congresswoman was shot in the head this weekend by a young rightwinger, debate turns to whether the standard and tone of political debate in the US is dangerously hysterical.

By any non-American standards, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia, Gabrielle Giffords was quite rightwing. However, she did support the minimal state healthcare plan Obama managed to get enacted.

This, to Sarah Palin, meant that Giffords and her allies were liberal-communist-fascist-Stalinist-Nazis, and this delightful image appeared on Sarah Palin's website during the recent elections, alongside the slogan 'don't retreat, reload'.

Now of course, the image has been deleted and Palin's spinners are out and about.

A Palin aide, Rebecca Mansour, speaking on the Tammy Bruce radio talkshow, denied the symbol represented crosshairs. "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," Mansour said.

And if you believe that, I have the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge and a perpetual motion device on my Ebay page ready for your purchase.

Instead, this is tucked away at the bottom of the front page, and rather unconvincing it is too:

"On The Tragedy in Arizona"

My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today's tragic shooting in Arizona.

On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.

American politics has become disgusting. There doesn't seem to be any space on the conservative side for opposing the Democrats while respecting their beliefs. Liberalism's main weakness is that it - by definition - respects the opinions of others and tries to understand all points of view. Conservatism assumes that everybody else is fundamentally wrong and perhaps evil. It was striking when Obama won that the right immediately started to act as though he'd staged a coup: blocking most of his legislation, questioning his citizenship, making thinly disguised racist remarks, distributing pictures of him as Hitler and Stalin.

Polls last year revealed that a majority of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist who "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government" while two-thirds of Republicans either believe or are not sure that the president is "a racist who hates white people", and more than half believe or are not sure that "he was not born in the US" and that he "wants the terrorists to win".

Gun sales rose 50% in the week Obama was elected: that isn't the sign of a healthy political sphere, to put it mildly. There must be ordinary decent conservatives out there who disagree with the Democrats without waving guns and talking about communist fascists, but they certainly don't get on the airwaves. Instead, the discourse tacks further and further right, and violence becomes more and more acceptable.

I'm not a weak liberal. I'd put quite a few of you in camps, quite frankly. But much as I despise people like Paul Uppal (my dishonest and untrustworthy MP), I don't think he's a threat to my way of life. The truth, served in a rich stew of sarcasm, should be enough to expose him. For all its faults, European muddle-headed liberalism has produced political systems in which the guns are largely kept hidden and the Palins are laughed out of the public sphere. Let's mourn Gabrielle Giffords, and the six people killed, and be thankful for that, at least.