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Pretty Palin

Posted January 12th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

This poster has reportedly been plastered all over San Francisco today:

Not that anyone’s to blame for the massacre in Tucson, mind you.  Least of all Sarah Palin.  It was just one of those things.  A random nutcase.  No connection to words or to hysterical rhetoric.  To images of crosshairs in a rifle sight.  To the absence of any meaningful gun laws.

So on this day when the victims are being mourned, Sarah makes it all about herself again.  She’s the victim, not the dead and wounded.  The victim of a blood libel, no less.

She has no idea what medieval blood libel actually is, of course.  No idea that it was directed at Jews, accused of slaughtering Christian children to bake their blood into matzos, and that it directly inspired pogroms.  No idea that using the term might even be considered just a tad in bad taste given that Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish.  No, Sarah is all innocence.

Put your hand over the poster so that you only see her face from the black maw of her mouth up.  You see it now?  Those dead eyes.  That snarl.   Almost as terrifying as the sight of a Glock 19 pointed in your direction.  Now put your hand over the top of her face, just beneath her nose, and you’ll see she’s enjoying herself — the perfect demagogue.

Be afraid of this pretty woman.  Be very afraid.  The righteousness;  the ignorance;  the absolute conviction;  the total absence of shame — yes, this is indeed the face of American terrorism.

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File under: art, Judaism, ugliness | Tagged: Tags: . Gabrielle Giffords, antisemitism, blood libel, demagogery, righteousness, Sarah Palin, Tucson massacre | 10 Comments
  1. Taha Abbas Kazmi says:
    January 12, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    She called the folks who helped pass Obama’s Health Care package (Gifford being one of them) “fascists”, “socialists”, and people “who are out to destroy our country”. She follows this up by marking their districts with the cross-hairs of a gun-sight and then is shocked when everyone, including the international community is looking at her as an instigator in this madness. If things weren’t bad enough, the crazies over at Westboro Church want to picket the funeral of the poor child who lost her life in the shooting. Their reasoning? According to their “God Hate’s Fags” website, God also hates Catholic’s because their idol worshipers (and the girls family is Catholic). This is craziness… I’m hoping lawmakers can do something to block their protest. If that psychotic 22-year old was a Muslim they would not have been describing him as a “young man with a troubled past”; they would have just come out and called him a Muslim Terrorist. …Sorrow for the times.

  2. Michael Kimt says:
    January 12, 2011 at 1:14 pm

    Interesting things are going on…

  3. Sue says:
    January 12, 2011 at 2:07 pm

    Thank you for such a well-written and articulate summary. It’s very difficult to find anything meaningful to do about this situation and not just throw your arms up in the air in despair.

  4. Lyn Ferrand says:
    January 12, 2011 at 2:38 pm

    Thank you. The voice of sanity!

  5. Mary Sherhart says:
    January 12, 2011 at 4:03 pm

    I believe she knew exactly what she was saying and intended it to be provocative with that horrible blood libel phrase. She has managed to get massive attention from the media in the meantime. I can only hope that the reaction will be so negative that her career will be down the tube.

  6. Lynn Rosen says:
    January 12, 2011 at 11:43 pm

    Yes, thanks for a voice of sanity in the wilderness of just a few. Could we have a “prayer” that the poor victim in Alaska has finally, with her grotesque comment about blood libel, has finally finished her pipeline to any public or political career.

  7. Yusuf says:
    January 13, 2011 at 5:28 am

    Personally, I hope she wins the presidency in 2012, and with apologies to well meaning Americans, here’s why.
    America is, in my opinion, probably the biggest impediment to peace and stability in the world today. A Palin presidency is the best chance I see under the present circumstances to bring about the fall of this “nexus of evil”.
    This could be accomplished by deviding the country so much it falls apart along red and blue
    lines or involving the country in so many “democratizations” overseas that the empire collapses.
    Some are going to say that both scenarios would cause a lot of death and turmoil, and I agree, but let me present a little allegory.
    Many years ago, in my pre Islamic days I lived with a woman who had a young, uncircumcised son. One day, when the boy was about 8, I was summoned by the mother and the loud crying of the son to the washroom, where the boy was standing and screaming in pain with his forskin caught in his zipper. His mother was asking for my advice on what to do and I told her to pull the zipper down quickly, which would relive most of the pain instantly. She forbade me from this action and demanded a less drastic solution, the result of which left her son screaming in pain while I tried to convince her. Eventually either she relented or I ignored her protests. (I can’t quite remember the details, and they are irrelevant ) I pulled the zipper down which immediately stopes the panicked crying of the boy.

  8. Chemical _turk says:
    January 14, 2011 at 10:34 am

    If she were to run for President she wouldn’t win. She would be self served best to remain a talking head, unencumbered by a Presidential office.

    The great American turn around is one the verge of happening, we’re to clever and the rest of the world is to focused on what is always focuses on “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

    No other country will lead because they don’t know how, they all pander to America because that’s all they have known since WWII.

  9. MaryamRazviPadela says:
    January 24, 2011 at 11:00 am

    Thank you for this post Lesley. Speaking of people who have no idea what references they are making, I was infuriated this past weekend by a woman standing in the middle of the city with a poster of Obama with a hitler-esque moustache drawn on chanting ‘let’s get hitler out of office” i told her she has no idea how offensive that is and she gave me a smirk. Maybe her and Palin need a study group. This is getting absurd.

  10. Sunny says:
    February 7, 2011 at 2:28 am

    Oops,
    I thought that your intention was to make peace in the world, after I see you TEDtalk video.
    But after reading your current article on Palin,it is very clear that you are not out there to make peace, because you are very liberal in your criticism for Palin’s instigation for Christian violence against the Jews.
    At the same time, when Mohammad fought his wars and came up with his stories of Mt Hira and Gabriel, you try all your best to associate Mohammad with Mysticism, God and what not.
    It does not matter – whether Mohammad’s open hatred for Jews in the latter part of his life or Palin’s so called hatred – its all the same. No mysticism either with Mohammad nor with Palin. – what is common between the two is – they employed a public God for their political gains, because a Private God cannot be used for Gain.

Thank God for Rootless Cosmopolitanism

Posted August 7th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

To my sorrow, Tony Judt is dead, at 62, of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

A brilliant historian and political essayist whose work is not nearly as widely known as it deserves,  he spent the last months of his life writing — or rather, since he was paralyzed from the neck down, dictating — a remarkable series of personal essays, all published in The New York Review of Books.

This morning, in my own small in memoriam for a man I’ve never met except through his writing, I went into the NYRB website and re-read some of Judt’s work.  One piece in particular caught my eye.   Edge People is on the dangers of identity politics, especially when used as “a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment.”   But the whole idea of identity politics, wrote Judt, was alien to him:

As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan.” But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.

In any event, all such labels make me uneasy. We know enough of ideological and political movements to be wary of exclusive solidarity in all its forms.

Like me, Judt saw the fact of his being placed at intersecting margins as “a decidedly advantageous perch” from which to see and grasp what’s going on in the world:

Unlike the late Edward Said, I believe I can understand and even empathize with those who know what it means to love a country. I don’t regard such sentiments as incomprehensible; I just don’t share them. But over the years these fierce unconditional loyalties—to a country, a God, an idea, or a man—have come to terrify me. The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest.

We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.

Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people.

Read his last book Ill Fares the Land, a cogent defense of social democracy.  Read his 2003 piece on the possibility of a binational Israel-Palestine here.  Read the correspondence that followed that piece,  with the knee-jerk accusation of offensiveness from the Anti-Defamation League‘s predictably offendable Abe Foxman.   And thank God for such “rootless cosmopolitans” as Tony Judt.

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File under: agnosticism, existence, Judaism, Middle East, sanity | Tagged: Tags: demagogery, globalization, identity politics, in memoriam, Israel, marginality, Palestine, Tony Judt | Be the First to leave a comment

Too Many Jews?

Posted May 15th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

If the headline read “Pat Buchanan:  Not Enough Muslims on the Supreme Court,” that’d be something.   Instead, what we get is the utterly predictable:  “Pat Buchanan:  Too Many Jews on the Supreme Court.”

Surprise surprise, Pat’s been Jew-counting.  Those damn Jews are taking over our most sacred institutions.  When all else fails — and the lesbian “smear” campaign against Elena Kagan is clearly faltering (amazing that it’s 2010 and we still talk of “accusations” of lesbianism) — there’s always good old antisemitism to fall back on.   As Jean-Paul Sartre put it:  “If Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would have had to invent them.”

Count ’em, says Buchanan from his current perch as a commentator on MSNBC.  Three of ’em if Kagan gets the nod!  Out of nine.  It’s a calamity for Christian America — a separate little cabal there on the bench, out to corrupt the purity of Christian values.  What do you mean, Judeo-Christian?  Nobody pays any attention to that Judeo bit.  That’s just another sop to the Jews, adulterating Christianity.  We have to put a stop to them.  We have to stand up to this canker in our society.  Who the hell do they think they are?

None of the three are religious?  Ha, you don’t believe that, do you?  It’s in their blood — the stain, as Philip Roth put it, the fatal flaw, as bad as being black.  And hey, if they’re not religious, that makes it even worse.  What do they believe in?  Abortion?  Gay marriage?  Civil rights?  The Antichrist?

Thank God (as it were) we have no less an authority than Richard Nixon’s assurance that Buchanan is neither an antisemite nor a Jew-hater (the precise distinction clear only to Nixon), but “a good patriotic American.”  The Nixon seal of approval is always reassuring.

Is it worth pointing out that only four Jews have sat on the Supreme Court before?  That a third of all justices have been Episcopalians, who are 1.7% of all Americans?   That the Constitution upheld by the court forbids discrimination on the basis of religion?   No — that’s only stooping to the level of Buchanan demagogery.

Come on, Obama:   rock Buchanan’s world and  nominate a Muslim next time.

Or even — gasp! — an atheist.

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File under: atheism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: antisemitism, demagogery, Elena Kagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jews, Muslims, Pat Buchanan, Philip Roth, Supreme Court | 5 Comments
  1. Steve Giordano says:
    May 15, 2010 at 11:11 pm

    Wasn’t someone counting Catholics on the Court recently? Some astronomical number, like four or five, I forget.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 16, 2010 at 10:24 am

      I think it’s six. Feeling Waspish, anyone?

  2. Lynn Rosen says:
    May 16, 2010 at 8:32 am

    Gasp, indeed! They’ve had to really scrape the dregs to find this hook! Gasp and grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

  3. Pietra says:
    May 17, 2010 at 11:08 am

    Little is more feared or reviled in this country than those of us who either don’t believe in god or are unable to accept organized religions’ versions of a “higher being.” And, yes, the other justices are Catholic (I wish more of them were catholic LC).

  4. Jennifer Reed says:
    May 17, 2010 at 12:17 pm

    It points to the fact that maybe status as a robust democracy should not keep out people whose views it found offensive.

    In particular reguard to Israel barring Mr. Chomsky today he said: “There were two basic points,” he told the interviewer. “One was that the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say — which puts them into the category of I suppose every other government in the world.”

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