Tea Party favourite Sarah Palin brands the linking of her rhetoric and 'crosshairs' map with the shootings in Arizona as 'blood libel'. Link to this video The sense of victimhood of the Tea Party and its fellow travellers should now be well known. It was Glenn Beck, after all – the man who accused America's first African American president of being "racist" – who last year told a rally of his followers in Washington that they had taken on the mantle of the civil rights movement.
Now Sarah Palin, former vice presidential candidate, has repeated this same repellent inversion, accusing those who criticised her for her violent political rhetoric against Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman shot in Arizona on Saturday, of perpetrating a "blood libel" against her. In using that expression, Palin has appropriated a phrase with a specific meaning in the long history of hate crime against the Jewish people.
First mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew to refer to the supposed Jewish guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, over the centuries it came to mean something even more pernicious: the fraudulent claim that Jews used the blood of murdered children in their rituals. More awful still, perhaps, is the context in which Palin has adopted the language: to recast herself as the victim in defending herself from claims that her language and behaviour may have helped create the context for the attempted murder of a congresswoman who, in fact, is Jewish.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/12/sarahpalin-arizona-shooting-blood-libel![](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/1/12/1294872882530/Steve-Bell-cartoon-13.01.-001.jpg)