By Joseph J. Honick
As I noted in another piece recently, quoting Rush Limbaugh, “words mean things.” We just never expected to hear certain particular words out of even the habitual verbal jabber like Ms Palin.
Showing just how thin her skin really is, and how faulty is her sense of understanding what flies uncontrolled from her lips, she reached a low even for her with accusations that journalists and pundits were committing “blood libel” against her by trying to blame her for the shootings in Tucson on January 8.
To be sure, it is at least a stretch to note that Palin had showed the district of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords through crosshairs normally associated with a gun sight. And she never suggested that Giffords’ opponent might have avoided his use of photos showing him in mysterious dark glasses and holding a machine gun. But using one of the basest anti-Semitic charges known in history to characterize critics left Ms Palin in a class by herself…a very low and unchallenged class, tainted by how much she even understood the implications of the term that flew out of an intemperate mouth.
For those unaware of what “blood libel” has meant in history, in brief, it is the term that was blasted at Jews hundreds of years ago by even church officials asserting that the blood of Christian children was used to make matzos (unleavened breads) for ceremonial use.
Many even used it as part of charges that Jews had killed Jesus. And this is but an abbreviated explanation of one of the most hated and hateful commentaries the history of which has filled books of both the worst of bigots and the treatises of scholars describing the consequences of the charges associated with its use that included thousands of tortured innocents and the thousands of deaths that followed.
So, in a fit of unbridled and uncontrolled thinking, the woman who would be leader of the world’s greatest democracy may well have revealed her basest instincts as well as her inability to deal with conflict.
Were any Republican, Democrat or independent have thought such a thing, it is doubtful he or she would have even whispered it in a darkened corner to a confidant, much less in a shrill public charge.
On the other hand, perhaps it is a positive event that finally provides the public with a true picture of the person who could have been forgiven the circus-like barnstorming about the nation to keep alive any idea of her positive presidential candidacy. Now there is no question that her use of one of history’s worst possible terms against her critics suggests she could have little standing among world diplomats and representatives of both political parties. So, for that exposure at least, we can be somewhat grateful….as well as deeply saddened that someone of such prominence could stoop to such depths.
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Joseph J. Honick is an international consultant to business and government and writes for many publications, including huntingtonnews.net. Honick can be reached at joehonick@gmail.com
