The left blames the right. The right blames the left. The sane blame insanity. What Loughner put on Youtube and what he said to friends about his conspiratorial beliefs is simple insanity. Many of us try to explain terrible events by trying to attribute order to them, giving them a cause and therefore and effect that we can comprehend. Some went after leaders on the political right including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but most strongly Governor Palin. They argued that her words and actions incited this man to this deed. Palin had evidently placed crosshairs on a map of congressional seats to target as especially important to win for those politically aligned with her. Rep. Giffords district was one of them. “Palin put crosshairs on Giffords! She must be responsible!”

Well friends, Loughner published a lot online and with incredible and ludicrous details. No where does he mention anything about Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh. Here is where anti-Judaism creeps in to the picture.

No few people accused Palin of inciting Loughner to this action and Palin responded by accusing them of a “blood libel“. “Blood Libel!” Some Jewish leaders screamed:

Blood libel is a term that belongs to us! It can only refer to accusations that Jews use the blood of others for baking matzah, for sacrifices, for gefilte fish, for powering Dimona, as a secret ingredient in Coca Cola, for making Barbies and other actions of pure evil.

Well, I embellish a bit. The reality is that “blood libel” does indeed have painful connotations for Jews. Libels have resulted in pogroms against the Jews time and again with some entire communities being massacred. Yet the concept is a simple one, and here Governor Palin was correct. The concept is that one community, or even a person, is accused of a murder in which they were totally uninvolved because the accuser wishes to do that community, or the specific people accused, harm regardless of their culpability. Jews were accused of crimes because people hated the Jews, not because they were involved in the crimes. Meanwhile, the Jewish community officially objects to Gov. Palin’s use of the term. Okay. I think it was appropriate to an extent, but using another term would have been better, one option which I will share with you in a moment.

Where does the anti-Judaism come in? It comes into the picture with the selective outcry about incitement. All one need do is to look at the difference between the coverage of the Fort Hood shooting and the Tucson shooting. In the Fort Hood shooting, the perpetrator was a devout Muslim who had at one point attended the mosque in America led by Anwar Al-Awlaki, near the top of the Al-Qaeda chart. Al-Awlaki is the head of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. No one in the mainstream media, N-O O-N-E, would ever accuse Maj. Hasan of being incited by an Imam in an American Mosque, would they??? Hasan had direct contact and was in communication with Al-Awlaki in America!!! But the media blamed the army, the right wing in fact, for persecuting him, even though the military welcomed him and went out of its way to help him through his schooling and residency.

Let us compare that to the Tucson incident. In that, the media immediately looked for incitement by right wing leaders, going so far as to ignore the facts published by Loughner himself that negated their arguments. Who needs facts when you have a narrative that you like to use! Some of you have just noted that this is where Governor Palin is connected with anti-Judaism.

Jews and Israel specifically are often accused of crimes that they not only did not commit, but can provide evidence that they had nothing to do with. Yet there are those out there who accuse none-the-less. Is the argument that Israel trained sharks to attack tourists in Egypt not libelous? What about the argument that the Mossad is responsible for the attacks against Christians in Iraq rather than the Muslims who claimed responsibility? How about those who argue that Israel perpetrated 9/11? I could go on and on, but you get the point. The assertion that Governor Palin’s words somehow impelled this wacko (wacko is far nicer a term than is deserving) to bloodlust is not only totally unfounded, but is in fact controverted by the evidence offered by Loughner himself. Should Governor Palin and others similarly accused have called the media’s accusation a “blood libel” as opposed to a Media Libel, which is the term I would rather apply, or some other similar term? Perhaps she should have used another term. But fussing at her about her use of “Blood Libel” misses the real point. The real point is that the same narrative hugging, fact denying, that is going on against Israel and has been going on against the Jews for time immemorial is being applied in the mainstream American press to their perceived opponents on the political right.

Far from being guilty of anti-Judaism, Governor Palin and others on the political right including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who were also similarly accused of incitement, were in many ways the victims of anti-Judaism simply applied beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community and unto friends of Israel. Meanwhile, as I write this, Rep. Giffords, a strong supporter of Israel and a member of the all too persecuted tribe, is making a remarkable recovery in a Houston hospital. My thoughts are with her, with her family, with others making recoveries and with the families of those who lost loved ones to Sinat Hinam, blind hatred.

As the furor in Israel over the article gathered into a diplomatic storm revolving around questions of anti-Semitism and freedom of speech, Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the article, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, was “outrageous” and compared it to a “blood libel,” referring to medieval anti-Semitic accusations that Jews ritually killed gentile children and collected their blood.

“We are not asking the government of Sweden for an apology,” Mr. Netanyahu said, according to an official who attended the cabinet meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We are asking for their condemnation. We are not asking from them anything we do not ask of ourselves.”

Why is “blood libel” in scare quotes? Maybe it’s something that is traced to medieval times but it has had a long, continuous and shameful history.

But what bugs me most about the article is how the reporter, Isabel Kershner, goes out of her way to explain why the charge may be credible.

The article, by the Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom, ran on an inside page of the newspaper on Aug. 17. It was based on accusations Mr. Bostrom heard from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s, and which he published in a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2001. Mr. Seaman said Mr. Bostrom last worked here in 2006.

Mr. Bostrom apparently revived the allegations by linking them to the July arrests of 44 people in New Jersey in a major corruption and international money laundering conspiracy that included several assemblymen, mayors and rabbis. One of its members, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, faces charges of conspiring to broker the illegal sale of a human kidney for transplant.

Aftonbladet followed up on Sunday with an article about one of the Palestinian families at the center of the original accusations.

So were the charges in the 90’s true? Kershner didn’t report that. (She also didn’t report that the charges echoed an incident in a Turkish movie of a few years ago.)

And of course the article also takes pains to inform us that Israel’s reaction has been counterproductive. Some other details that are missing were noted by Barry Rubin:

And then there is the Swedish governmental complicity in this matter, since the original accusations were made in a book subsidized with its funds. There’s also far more behind the surface. For example, there is now a whispering campaign about alleged Jewish influence in Sweden, including personal attacks on the country’s ambassador to Israel for issuing a very carefully worded semi-apology.

Finally, this affair is only one of a number of such stories appearing simultaneously. In the focus on Sweden, an equally bad blood libel story in the Netherlands’ leading newspaper is being ignored. It accuses Jews of being Satan-worshippers who spread the swine flu. No, that’s not an exaggeration.

So here is how the system works. Palestinians or other Arabs or other Muslims, individuals or groups, tell incredible lies about Israel and then these are uncritically published in Western media. Aren’t reporters supposed to examine stories for accuracy BEFORE they are published? And aren’t editors supposed to critically look at what their publishing to see if it is credible?

So then it turns out that the Swedish government – not just the newspaper – is complicit in spreading the libel and the incident is a sign of a general obliviousness to outrageous claims made against Israel and Jews. It is the sign of a level of tolerance for the antisemitism, even in the enlightened West. The ire over this incident shouldn’t be confined to Israel. It seems to be absent from the New York Times.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.

[…] The report mentioned Brooklyn resident Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who is accused of involvement in the recent human organ-trafficking case that caused a storm in the US and Israel. The report said Palestinians claim youngsters were forced to give up theirs before being executed. This suspicion, the report said, may lead to an international war crimes investigation against Israel.

And who, pray tell, is feeding the author this information?

Guess.

Aftonbladet also said Palestinian youths who were snatched from their villages in the middle of the night were buried after being dismembered. The reporter, Donald Boström, said he was informed of the alleged atrocities by UN employees while he was working on a book in the West Bank.

Those would be the same eyewitnesses that said that Israeli soldiers were bulldozing hundreds of bodies in Jenin. Yes, the ever-reliable Palestinian eyewitnesses—there’s no stopping their imaginations, in any case. As to their truthfulness, well—it’s been proven to be extremely limited.

Put this one in the same category as Palestinians who insist that Yasser Arafat was killed by Israeli death rays, Israel is giving Palestinians gum that increases their libido, and, of course, the Suha Arafat claim that Israel is poisoning Palestinian children. There is nothing, it seems, that people won’t blame on Israel. But that’s not much of a surprise. They blamed Jews for poisoning wells, too.

You would think that in this day and age, lies like this would not be published. But then you would be vastly underestimating the widespread insanity that I like to call Israel Derangement Syndrome. If Israel didn’t exist, they’d still be blaming us Jews in pretty much the same way—we just would be blamed for doing it to Swedes instead of Palestinians.

I would like nothing more than to wake up and find that this article was one big hoax. I suspect that won’t happen.