1 Kampf, Z & Katriel T. (2016). Political Condemnations: Public Speech Acts and the Moralization of Discourse. The Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective. D. Carbaugh (Ed.). New-York: Routledge. Political Condemnations: Public Speech Acts and the Moralization of Discourse Zohar Kampf and Tamar Katriel Abstract The genre of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame, has long been identified as a cultural resource for the ceremonial articulation of communal values and the discursive production of communities. While the rhetoric of praise has drawn considerable research attention, the rhetoric of blame has been under-studied despite its crucial role in human rights and related discourse. Combining rhetorical analysis and speech act theory, this chapter analyzes the role of political condemnations - speech acts designed to “mobilize shame” by publicizing disapproval of an alleged transgression - in both national and international arenas. Our analysis takes the example of condemnations concerning the maltreatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state as voiced by a variety of institutional actors who vary in the degree of their cultural-political proximity to the transgressor: B'Tselem, BDS, UN, and EU. Examining their discourses of condemnation, we ask: What are the discursive features that characterize political condemnations? How does the condemning party’s relationship to the transgressing party affect their stylistic choices? And how are condemnations linked to culturally inflected modes of speaking, universal and particular moral scripts, and institutional rhetoric? Our analysis traces stylistic and functional differences among the four organizations' epideictic of blame while confirming the centrality of condemnations as public speech acts. Introduction The discourse of human rights, which is dominant in civil societies around the world today, holds up a globalized vision of a 'decent society', i.e. a society, according to philosopher Avishai Margalit, "whose institutions do not humiliate people" (Margalit 1996, p. 1). Human rights discourse is constructed in large part through the use of epideictic rhetoric (Rosenfield, 1980) – the rhetoric of praise and blame, which acknowledges and promotes values of equality and human respect on the one hand and disparages those social bodies and actors who violate them on the other. As recognized by students of rhetoric since antiquity, in assigning nobility and baseness to public actors and their actions, epideictic rhetoric sets up models for conduct and thereby reinforces shared cultural values and traditions (Hauser, 1999). While scholarship on epideictic rhetoric has tended to focus on the role of discourses of praise in constructing moral