When You Can’t Blame the Jews, There is Always Sarah Palin

                               Abraham H. Miller

Not surprisingly, the tragic and senseless shooting of Representative  Gabrielle Giffords and other innocent victims in Tucson, Arizona on the morning  of January 8, 2011  brought out the worst of the usual partisan blame game.  In an act of hypocrisy typical of the mainstream media,  right-wing political divisiveness was latched on to as  the cause of  the shooting.  Ironically the reprehensible accusation only further exacerbated the country’s political divisions. By the end of the end of the day, left-wing bloggers were calling for violence against Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and anyone else on the right they had been told were responsible for the event.

Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and talk radio were attacked  as the left seemed to flood conservative talk shows with well-coordinated attacks.  KSFO’s Barbara Simpson, on the evening of January 08, was so overwhelmed by harsh, unrelenting, and absurd attacks that she called for a break just to get her mental bearings. Keith Olbermann blabbered irrationally about the volatile climate created by the right, pausing sufficiently to address his own misguided participation in political vitriol as if to underscore the legitimacy of the point he was making.

We are to believe that there but for some rhetoric about political opponents on Sarah Palin’s and other right-wing websites, all would be calm in Tucson and Congresswoman Giffords would be home breaking bread with her family. That more than 2.5 million people have visited Palin’s website without any of them having shot anyone seems to be irrelevant. 

The alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, appears  to be a deranged loner rather than a political ideologue.  As for being pushed over the edge by the political right, there are some prominent discrepancies in that theory. He lists the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books, hardly a choice to be shared with Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or any other commentator from the right.  Loughner  also lists in this category Mein Kampf, a work that is anathema to both sides of the political continuum. His YouTube rants are reminiscent of the “Interview with a Fascist Beast,” a confused, incoherent rambling of a violent, young British Neo-Nazi who admired both Hitler and Stalin, gleaning contradictory political gems from both totalitarian leaders. The interview was reprinted in Seymour M. Lipset’s classic, Political Man.     

A former classmate of Loughner describes him as a pot-smoking leftist. Clearly, that is no more a cause of the shooting than is Sarah Palin’s website, but don’t count on the mainstream media to even hint at it as important.  There is no political gain unless it is the right that can be held responsible for the tragedy. 

The Pentagon issued an 86-page report on the Fort Hood Massacre and managed never to mention the Islamic faith of the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Hasan.  Rest assured if Major Hasan had been corresponding with Sarah Palin and not a radical imam in Yemen, the Pentagon would have been all over it like an extended series of carpet bombings. 

Without a shred of evidence that Jared Loughner ever visited a conservative web site, could even spell “Palin” and without any knowledge of the source of his disagreement, if any, with Congresswoman Giffords,  the left resorted to: the right did it.  Interestingly, there has been little speculation in the mainstream media over whether Giffords s was shot by a Mein Kampf-loving, violent crazy because she is Jewish and supports Israel.

When the first reports of John F. Kennedy’s assassination hit the air waves, the prominent news media said that it was the right-wing climate in Dallas that led to Kennedy’s assassination.  Lee Harvey Oswald was later found to be a leftist, heavily involved with Fair Play for Cuba, and he had been a defector to the Soviet Union. When Oswald’s leftist credentials emerged, the media was conspicuously silent about his leftist political leanings as a cause of the assassination

Millions of people read  web sites of the right and kill no one.  Just as millions of leftist screamed for the assassination of George W. Bush and didn’t even buy a firearm. During the Bush administration, a fictional British documentary had as its premise that George W. Bush was assassinated in Chicago.  The mainstream media expressed no outraged about whether the film, Death of a President,  or  the venom inherent in its ensuing publicity campaign would lead to a political assassination. The  Norwegian Socialist Left Party’s website actually offered money to anyone who would assassinate President George W. Bush, and the world’s major media said nothing. 

It is only the political rhetoric of the right that produces violence according to the prominent media.  People who would defend your right to watch countless hours of violent pornographic acts against women will tell you that tens of millions of people watch violent pornography without committing sexual violence. Incongruously, they will also tell you that painting a target on a politician you want to defeat at the polls leads to political assassination, especially if the target is to be found on Sarah Palin’s webstie.     

In recent weeks, Egypt blamed shark attacks on tourists in the waters off Sharim el Sheik on Zionist-trained sharks, and Saudi Arabia arrested a vulture, tagged with a scientific flight monitor from Tel Aviv University, as a spy.  When it comes to conspiracy theories, Sarah Palin has become to the mainstream media in America what Jews have been to the Arab world, a convenient scapegoat for paranoid delusion.   

In the end, the left will realize its worst fears.  The irrational accusations are generating enormous sympathy for Palin and giving her enhanced media exposures.  Perhaps, the left needs to be reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation about the French Revolution: the revolution resulted not from those who wanted it to occur, but by the actions of those who least desired it caused it to occur.