Sarah Palin, Anti-Semitism, and the Right

by Nicholas Jahr I know this is last week’s news, if that. Even so, something about Sarah Palin’s charge that she was the victim of “a blood libel”-- this in the wake of a shooting that left a Jewish Congressional rep in critical condition -- plagues me. The consensus seems to be that Palin swiped the phrase from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who fired it off in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal two days before Palin posted her statement to Facebook. 48 hours after the shooting, Reynolds wrote:

So as the usual talking heads begin their “have you no decency?” routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel? ... if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it? ... those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America’s political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Reynolds is by most accounts a serious man. Clearly he intended the phrase as a rhetorical flourish meaning little more than ‘a false accusation of murder.’ But it’s harder to imagine that he -- as opposed to Palin -- was unaware of the phrase’s origins and connotations. And if Reynolds was aware of its significance, why use it? Perhaps more to the point, why did the Journal’s editors let him use it? Similarly, Palin didn’t just set up a video camera in her basement, nor do her appearances on the stump suggest she could draft even such a rudimentary statement on her own. She had help, and no one in her camp thought twice about invoking the blood libel. Nor did the Right, which predictably rallied to her defense (see the summary compiled by Media Matters). The Journal called out the big guns, recruiting Shmuley Boteach (the former Lubavitcher and author of Kosher Sex, who has accused President Obama of “bullying” Israel) to show that the Jews didn’t mind. In The Forward, Benyamin Korn, director of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin (who knew?) seized on the moment to compare Palin to Begin. Even the ADL offered only muted criticism of Palin; Abe Foxman spent the first third of his brief statement on the matter decrying the “political blame game,” saying only in the last third that “we wish that Palin had used another phrase” (one wonders how the organization would have responded if a prominent Muslim had invoked the phrase under analogous circumstances). But she didn’t, and the closing of the ranks makes the initial contradiction all the more striking. For those of you who haven’t been playing along at home, this isn’t the first time the specter of anti-Semitism has flickered back into view on the Right lately. In November, Glenn Beck devoted several episodes of his show to George Soros, titling his three-hour magnum opus “The Puppet Master”. Jon Stewart treated Beck’s ‘investigation’ with the seriousness it deserved, but it’s still worth emphasizing that Beck and his staff drew on a rich tradition of anti-Semitic imagery and stereotypes, whether they were fading from an image of the Star of David to Soros’ headshot or more or less borrowing a page from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and portraying Soros as the omnipotent Jewish banker seeking to establish one world government. (Once again, Media Matters thoroughly annotated Beck’s attacks on Soros; scroll to the end for some revealing info on Beck’s favorite authors.) Beck has set off alarms before. After Simon Greer, president and CEO of Jewish Funds for Justice, criticized Beck’s relentless references to the Holocaust and penchant for branding anyone he disagrees with a Nazi, Beck retaliated by suggesting Greer’s professed belief in the common good led straight to the death camps (Stephen Colbert could not have done better). JFSJ has since launched a campaign to compel Fox to pull Beck off the air. In July, the ADL called Beck out for insinuating on his radio show that the Jews killed Jesus. Beck issued the requisite mea culpa; this time around the ADL only saw fit to criticize Beck’s remarks about Soros’ childhood. Writing in The Nation on Beck’s theatrics and the persistence of anti-Semitism, Jonathan Schell calls attention to what’s “novel” in all this:

Beck, while heaping the classic anti-Semitic slurs on Soros, insinuates that Soros, a Holocaust survivor, is himself anti-Semitic. Beck, who denies that he is an anti-Semite, accuses Soros of having had to “go over and take the lands from the people, his Jewish friends and neighbors, who were being sent to the gas chambers” when he was a boy in Hungary during World War II. (In reality, as Michael Kaufman reveals in his book Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, Soros’s Christian protector was ordered to inventory the estate of a Jewish aristocrat who had escaped Hungary. He brought Soros, 13 at the time, with him. Soros wandered the estate and rode a horse. He never took any lands or anything else from Holocaust victims or anyone else.) In a perverse way, the libel is a perfect complement to the history of anti-Semitism: now the Jew is found to be guilty of, on top of all of history’s other evils, his own people’s persecution.

To my mind Schell’s broader argument about anti-Semitism gives the cultural underpinnings of Nazism too much credence, but here he has his hands on something. It strikes me that crying ‘blood libel’ after the Tucson shooting is a similar rhetorical maneuver: both appropriate specifically Jewish tribulations and purge them of precisely that dimension. The Jews were complicit in the Holocaust alongside the Nazis and their collaborators; the blood libel becomes a slander that could be leveled against anyone. It neuters the charge, strips those who need it of the ability to name the slander they suffer. At least in a way that sounds a clear alarm. Maybe this is too canny by half. I don’t think there are right-wing talking points in circulation on how to subvert expressions of Jewish suffering. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the internal logic of the rhetoric itself, and the political circumstances in which it functions. The Holocaust has become the benchmark of ‘evil’ in our political discourse; if denying the event itself isn’t an option, then it makes sense that latent (or covert) anti-Semitism would be expressed by shifting the blame. As for the blood libel, the Right circles the wagons around Palin because they’re not only defending her (to say nothing of the idea that she’s a worthy candidate for public office), but the elements of their own base that, on some level, they know could be accused of such ‘insensitivity.’ After all, Beck and Palin are just the high-profile exemplars of this trend. Beck, we should note, was one of the early boosters of the Tea Party protests against the Obama administration. The socialism of fools was on display there as well, with that bastion of liberalism the Daily News reporting that some partiers left several mash notes for Rep. Anthony Weiner, one of which was addressed to “Schlomo” and another signed with a swastika (predictably, Reps Barney Frank and John Lewis also came in for abuse, despite the fact that none of the three were major machers in the health care fight). Down in Texas, last November’s election saw the Republicans take 22 new seats in the state’s House of Representatives (for a 99 to 51 majority). Emboldened, ‘Tea Party’ activists and other conservatives (whether or not there’s a meaningful distinction between the two remains unclear to me) attempted to oust the incumbent Republican Speaker of the House, Rep. Joe Straus (San Antonio). Straus is Jewish, and e-mails between conservatives mentioned his rabbi and lauded the Christianity of his opponents. According to the Dallas Morning News, one of those e-mails memorably declared: “Straus is going down in Jesus’ name.” About two weeks later, the venerable Texas Observer turned up another e-mail exchange in which a State Republican Executive Committee member insisted, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.” Those true Christian conservatives insisted their opposition was based on the issues (specifically votes cast by Straus they construed as pro-choice and pro-gay), not on religion. The rest of us strain to hear the dog whistles. Maybe we’re straining too hard. I don’t think this is all evidence of some vast right wing anti-Semitic conspiracy; it’s mostly a question of elective affinities. Regardless, I’d bet there are incidents that have escaped my attention: feel free to include links in the comments.