Here's the irony as I see it:

[xiphias]

So, Sarah Palin says that the violent actions of a person are the responsibility of that person alone: that speech is not a proximate cause of violence. There's a certain sense to that. I may not AGREE with it, but the statement is defensible.

(There is also the separate claim that, even if hateful speech can trigger violence, HER speech specifically wasn't the trigger for THIS violent action, and I do find that provisionally credible.)

She then claims that the rush to judgment that HER speech was a trigger for the media to dogpile on her, and that that was a "blood libel."

The irony here is that a blood libel is very specifically a specific kind of violent hate speech that leads people to take violent actions. That's what it IS. In the very same speech, she says that a particular type of action doesn't exist, that, anyway, she didn't do it, and then accuses other people of doing exactly that same thing. Accidentally, of course -- she was clearly unaware of what "blood libel" MEANS, but the irony still exists.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think her claim is accurate: her words / images were not a *direct* cause of the event. (Sarah Palin doesn't use big words like "proximate". You intellectual elitist, you ;-)

She didn't light the fire. She may have added fuel to the pile, maybe slopped on a little gasoline. But how was she to know it would burn?

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

See, I continue to live in my bubble. Are people really saying she was the proximate cause? Hell, even Kelly with his help us remove Giffords from office - shoot a fully automatic m16 with Jesse Kelly wording for his fundraiser wasn't a proximate cause.

My head was going splodey this week, though, with the "the other side is worse and how dare you tell me we're at fault" in response to "y'know, this eliminationist rhetoric is really poisonous."

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

No, I do not think they were. I think people called her a contributing cause. (And I think that's accurate.)

But her response implied they were doing so, presumably in order to cast herself as innocent victim of the evil media who hate her.

Palin

[(Anonymous)]

Based on all the actual evidence, there's not a shred that says Palin or rhetoric or anything else contributed to this attack. The kid has had a thing for Giffords since 2007. He's an anarchist. His friend says he just wants to watch the world burn but he doesn't watch news and isn't political.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that if Palin had never existed, this shooting still would have taken place.