Blood libel.
Seriously?
A little story: one that I am told is absolutely true. Now maybe it is, maybe it isn’t…but it makes the point.
In a town in Eastern Europe long ago, there was a small community of Jews who resided there and more or less kept to themselves. But their very presence was an irritant to many in the village, particularly so to one villager–a rabid anti-Semite–who decided the best thing to do was target the rabbi and turn the whole of the village against him.
And so, in the dead of night, the villager smothered his own six month old infant in the crib. Then he took the child’s corpse, stole over to the rabbi’s house and buried the child in a shallow grave.
Upon the morning, the alarmed mother discovered the absent child. Her screams summoned the entire village and the husband, “sharing” his wife’s ire, suggested that the Jews be investigated first since there had been tales of how they loved to use the blood of Christian children in their secret rites. So they converged upon the rabbi’s home and the newly turned earth of the grave was quickly discovered.
The rabbi was promptly hung and the rest of the Jews either killed or driven from the city.
Here’s an offer I will make you, on behalf of myself and my fellow Jews: I will continue not to use gun imagery and language in my discourse so that no one can possibly accuse me of having anything to do with acts of violence, and you keep your mouth shut about blood libels so that no one can possibly mistake you for being one of us.
PAD
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Mr. Fuller is making time-bomb-like noises himself. First, he went to Loghner’s house, ostensibly to forgive the parents, although I don’t know if he saw them or not, and now this occasion. I think we have a serious PTSD situation here, and we have to give him therapy before things get worse.
Well, I see an article this morning on MSNBC.com that makes me shake my head. Since the media has gotten bored with whether or not violent rhetoric had something to do with the shooting in Arizona, they’ve turned to Old Reliable: are video games somehow to blame?
You’re kidding.
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Well, it goes right back to my original question that started off all the debate: considering the world in which Palin operates, where there is always a desire to try to pin blame on as many people as possible when something goes wrong, how did it never occur to her that–if someone on her target list was shot–she wouldn’t wind up getting blowback from it?
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Either she didn’t know or she didn’t care. Or maybe it was both. Ignorance and arrogance is a deadly combination. That’s what lands you in wars because of false information.
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PAD
The MSNBC article was titled: “Do video games fuel mental health problems?”
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The basis of the article comes from the results of a 2-year study done of some 3000 children in Singapore and whether they became game addicts.
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The article also talks about how some other research can find no such link, and the fact that this particular study may be seriously flawed.
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As GamePolitics points out, “The study, “Pathological video game use among youth 8 to 18: A national study,” was conducted by Gentile, who is also the director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family”.
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I find the study flawed, the group behind it biased against video games in general, and MSNBC guilty of looking for an angle.
You can file this under: People With Way Too Much Time On Their Hands.
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The Battle Hymn of Sarah Palin:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/battle-hymn-sarah-palin#comments
So Palin decided to face her critics by going where she had no critics–Fox News–and proceeded to resolutely miss the point of all the criticisms by arguing the stuff that no one was was disputing.
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For instance, in regards to her misuse of the term “blood libel,” she declared: “I think the critics again were using anything that they could gather out of that statement. You can spin up anything out of anybody’s statements that are released and use them against the person who is making the statement.”
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Yes. That’s right. People can spin up anything out of people’s statements. So when those statements are rife with gun rhetoric, it’s logical to assume that someone may spin them into a call for action. So maybe she should think about what she says. Or when those statements focus on your victimhood when you are, in fact, not a victim, and you do so using terminology loaded with raw emotion for Jews, who have a history of people trying to kill them, then maybe she should think about finding a better point of reference.
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But she didn’t think. Instead, her response was, “They can’t make us sit down and shut up.” Except no one is asking her to do either. They’re asking her to think before she speaks. Which is, obviously, too much trouble.
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Here’s the money quote: “I receive a lot of death threats. My children do.” Okay. I believe that. There’s lots of nuts out there. Which would mean that she, of all people–of all people–should be sensitive about it when people are expressing fear that her words might lead to violence. She should be able to show empathy.
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She’s unable to do so.
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What does that say? Why would anyone want a clueless woman with no empathy in the White House?
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PAD
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“Here’s the money quote: “I receive a lot of death threats. My children do.” Okay. I believe that.”
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Yeah, and I’m in a position to tell you as a fact that death threats to various Democrats in my state, other states and for the President increased with both the rise of the Tea Party and the during the usage last year of the "2nd Amendment Remedies" rhetoric by a huge margin.
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I missed it, but did Hannity blow her death threats statement off and point out that every politician always gets death threats like he did to several people last year who brought up the increasing number of death threats against Democrats? I'll just take a guess that the answer is "no."
Well, it’s pretty obvious that Palin is the biggest victim in the Arizona shooting. After all, she’s alive, safe, and more than a thousand miles away.
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Disgusting.