Juan Cole put up an interesting post today that may put Sarah Palin's evocation of "blood libel" in proper context.
Palin Borrows ‘Blood Libel’ from Israeli Far Right
Below the fold I'll give you a few excerpts from professor Cole's posting and a bit of my own view of Sister Sarah's Sanguineous Sophistry.
Palin's now well known excursion into the semiotics of victimhood:
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.
Those words struck many on this board, and other commentators, as perhaps the product of the cluelessness we have come to associate with the former half-term governor.
To the contrary, says Cole:
I believe that the phrase was taken over by Palin’s speech writers from right wing Israeli discourse.
That is to say, the "blood libel" term" was deliberately used and chosen with some care to speak to one or more Palin constituencies, and to the special meanings those constituencies attach to the state of Israel and the policies it has pursued since the mid-1970s.
Dr. Cole goes on to examine the late history of Israeli use of "blood libel" and the American context in which such phraseology could be understood and ultimately deployed by the American right wing to describe its own current tribulations - and to allude, perhaps, to its aspirations.
For example, in response to the The Goldstone Report, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech in New Orleans this past November, denounced the attempted delegitimization of of the Jewish state and pronounced it "a new blood libel." He went on to aver that the international community "owes Israel an apology."
Cole observes that, incidentally, the report Netanyahu attacked was prepared for the United Nations Human Rights Council under the leadership of a South Africa Jew who is widely respected for his inquiries into political violence in post apartheid South Africa and for his prosecution of cases in the Hague of Bosnian and Rwandan war crimes.
Finding further evidence of the new-minted currency of the charge of "blood libel," Cole offers a US Open Source Center translation of an August 2010 Russian language commentary, sourced to the Aveterra LiveJournal in Russian — “Israeli Agency for Political and Politological Information”, which charges that, “In light of the upcoming talks at the White House and Arab ultimatums, I will venture to declare this meeting ‘the new blood libel’ of the US Administration and its accessories with the aim of destroying the Jewish people under the pretext of peace."
Professor Cole speculates on the likely motivation behind recent right-wing Israeli dredging up of this ancient shibboleth. Israeli no longer looks to the world like a David facing down the Arab Goliath, as it did in the 1967 and 1973 wars against neighbors with powerful conventional armed forces; now, as depicted in the Goldstone report, it can easily be perceived as a bully prone to pick - rather fecklessly - on weak Palestinians and Lebanese. In particular, says Cole:
The Gaza War cannot be criticized because that would make Netanyahu face the inadequacies he has suppressed through his bullying demeanor. To protect himself from critique he must make himself an innocent victim, attacked by the irrational hatreds of others. In this way, the Goldstone Report, headed by a prominent Jewish jurist, becomes equivalent to the medieval persecution of Jews by fanatical and bigoted Christians.
Perhaps the whole "blood libel" meme took flight, as reported last February in Haaretz, when an Israeli rabbi, accused of sexual indiscretion, "dismissed the charges as… you guessed it… ‘a blood libel.’"
Since the 1970s in particular, says professor Cole, the American right has looked to Israel for inspiration. Some have seen her as a survivor and a force to be reckoned with - a sort of Rambo State - in the Middle-East, as the stakes for American interests there have increased and American hegemony has been challenged by Iran.
Thus, a successful Israeli operation such as the rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976 gave the American right wing heart. Israelis were promoted into the ranks of white people (“whiteness,” which began by implying a northern European Protestant ethnicity, can be gained or lost over time by ethnic groups in the United States). The Israelis’ victories over brown peoples were psychological palliatives for the raw feelings of declining American white populists.
As well. the American Christian Right has proselytized the eschatology of an Israel central to the final confrontation of good and evil - though Israeli Jews themselves are to convert or be consumed in the end.
Says Cole:
Palin took the long-standing American right wing populist use of the Israelis as a symbol of white biblical riposte to the siege of pagan brown peoples a step further on Wednesday. She actually identified her followers as themselves a sort of tribe of Israel, and thus open to the same kind of persecution that the children of Israel have long suffered from. This extreme identification with the themes of the Likud and Shas Parties in Israel is an extension of the long-standing tradition of Christian Zionism.
To anchor his speculation in psychology, Cole cites the work of psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who says Cole, argued that,
the central human neurosis is an inferiority complex deriving from feelings of inadequacies in childhood, and that some people deal with it by over-compensating and developing a superiority complex, leading them to denigrate and put down others on the basis of ethnicity, for instance. That is, some people deal with their feelings of inadequacy by becoming competent and confident and positive toward their neighbors. Others deal with them by becoming bullies.
He identifies Netanyahu as such as neurotic bully. Sarah Palin seems to fit the syndrome as well.
I'll close by talking briefly about another aspect demonstrated by the recent spread of the "blood libel" meme.
Language theorist Kenneth Burke wrote extensively about the dramatistic basis of human motivation and discourse. He defined mankind as:
the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection.
He contended that much of what we do occurs on the "symbolic plane," and that to understand the meaning of human action, we must analyze the symbolic value of the act.
Sarah Palin, it is clear, deliberately timed her "blood libel" video excursion to intercept and preempt the news cycle - and president Obama's offerings on the subject - on the day of national mourning for those killed and wounded in Tuscon. A diarist earlier today (link)examined the performance and found it off key. From professor Cole we now have evidence that, given her connection to Christian radicalism, Palin may well have carefully chosen the "blood libel" meme for reasons political AND personal.
Finally lets go to the idea of a meme like "blood libel." I believe that Kenneth Burke would be delighted - in a clinical, philosophical way - with the uses of the meme cited by professor Cole. It comes across as a prime example of what Burke called "Casuistic Stretching."
Burke saw this as a prime basis in language for the communication of collective meaning. If all meanings were reducible to syllogisms, to schematic representations of things in the world, how would people tell stories or create new ways of thinking about the world? Casuistic stretching of terms - like "blood libel" - serve as metaphors, relating one experience to another in a figurative way, permitting actors to move on the symbolic plane from past situations to presents ones - to make sense of emergent events. These tools of discourse are particularly in demand in times when norms are under challenge, when people need to come up with explanations for the untoward - or in the case of the recent mayhem in Tuscon - the unthinkable.
Now certainly, as evidenced by this community's reaction to Palin's evocation of "blood libel," a given metaphorical usage can be unpalatable to some. (Here, with "unpalatable," I evoke a root metaphor, whereby things of dubious social acceptability are typically likened to bad taste or smell.) Yet in Palin's world, "blood libel" is a garment that fits and comforts in this chilly situation - and it probably wears well for at least some of her audience.
So give Sister Sarah (and/or her speech writers) credit where it is due. She's out there figrin' things out for ya!