On October 5, 1995, as the Knesset was meeting to ratify the second Oslo agreement, thirty thousand Greater Israel zealots, Likud Party supporters, militant West Bank settlers, and right-wing nationalists rallied in Jerusalem’s Zion Square. For months, certain ultra-Orthodox rabbis and scholars had been suggesting that, because Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was willing to consider territorial concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians, it would be permissible, even obligatory, to kill him. In Zion Square, protesters carried pictures of Rabin, doctored to show him in Nazi uniform or with crosshairs over his face. The crowd chanted “Rabin boged!”—“Rabin is a traitor!”—and, again and again, “Death to Rabin!” From a balcony, prominent opposition politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, looked on benevolently and uttered no rebukes. A month later, at another, larger rally, this one for peace, Rabin was assassinated.
In 1995 in Jerusalem, the connection between talk and action was direct and unmistakable. The killer, Yigal Amir, a student of Jewish law, was an activist of the organized religious right. He was neither delusional nor incoherent. “I did this to stop the peace process,” he explained at a court hearing. “We need to be coldhearted.” He acted with a clear political purpose, one that he shared with much of the mainstream religious and secular right. Within six months, Netanyahu was Prime Minister; Rabin’s widow, Leah, and many other Israelis never forgave him for what they saw as his cynical tolerance of the extremist stew that had nurtured the murderer.
In 2011 in Tucson, there was no such close, let alone causal, connection. The madman who fired a bullet through the brain of a vibrant young member of Congress as she was conducting an informal outdoor meeting with constituents—and who kept pulling the trigger until the high-capacity magazine of his semiautomatic pistol was empty and six people (a federal judge, a young aide, three retirees, and a nine-year-old girl) lay dead or mortally wounded—chose a political figure and a political event as the targets of his murderous rage. He has “political” views, but they are incoherent to the point of incomprehensibility. He is not discernibly a member or follower of any sect or movement; he had no discernible political goal or grievance. No one applauded or took satisfaction in what he did. In these and other ways, this was not like Jerusalem (and for that we can be grimly grateful). It was not like Oklahoma City. It was not like the murder of Benazir Bhutto or, two weeks ago, of Salmaan Taseer, the secularist governor of the Punjab province of Pakistan. The crime in Tucson, it appears, had more in common with one of those all too frequent schoolhouse or workplace killing sprees than with a purposeful act of political violence. “The truth,” President Obama said, four days after the shootings, “is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.”
That is indeed the truth. But it is also the truth that, when the news broke of the Tucson shootings, no one’s first thought was that some unhinged leftist was responsible. From the outset, commentators of all persuasions assumed something like the opposite—assumed it openly if their instant impulse was accusatory, implicitly if it was defensive. And no wonder. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (who, miraculously, survived) is a Democrat. Last March, after she voted for the health-care law, someone shattered the plate-glass door of her Tucson office. Her Republican opponent in the November election, whose campaign poster showed him cradling an assault rifle, held a gun-themed fund-raiser. (“Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”) Giffords herself expressed concern about the political use of violent imagery. “For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” she told an interviewer. “But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/01/24/110124taco_talk_hertzberg
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