Blood Liberal

As a Jew--ha-ha, boo-yeah, suckas!--okay, uh, as a Jew-ish America, let me just say that the idea that Sarah Palin has commited some unspeakable indecency by using the phrase "blood libel" in the manner that she did is totally unfair and almost completely incorrect. In fact, I propose to you that she used the phrase in a perfectly proper and appropriate fashion.

First of all, the blood libel that I keep hearing people talk about in deploring her comments is not THE blood libel. Indeed, the blood libel against Jews was not that they murdered gentile children and used their blood in religious rituals, which was an occasionally potent folk belief that popped up persistently but intermittently in the middle ages, but rather the Church doctrine that Jews had killed Jesus, that they as a "people" bore collective guilt for his execution.

Anyway, until the phrase was deployed in an Unapproved Manner, it was understood to have a certain plasticity, and while it was never in wide, general usage given its understood significance to Jews, you could still hear it, from time to time, referring to exactly that to which it refers: the libelous manufacture of guilt, often collective guilt, for a crime committed by one's assumed or perceived peers and allies.