Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at the Wall Street Journal:
Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.
If we define it vaguely enough and stretch the definition a little bit, we can surely apply “blood libel” to a highly simplified and distorted portrayal of media coverage of the Tuscon shootings and right wing rhetoric.
To be fair, Rabbi Boteach does a very good job of explaining the origins and history of antisemitic murder that the “blood libel” myth represents. All the more disappointing that he has chosen to trivialize this history for partisan purposes.
