Over at Greg's place, I explain why Sarah Palin's use of blood libel in the context of people accusing her of being responsible for the incident in Tucson is wrong, even if the accusations are unfair:
Blood libel is a term that usually refers to an ancient falsehood that Jews use the blood of Christian children in religious rituals. For hundreds of years, particularly during the Middle Ages, it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews in the street and their expulsion from entire countries. "Blood libel" is not wrongfully assigning guilt to an individual for murder, but rather assigning guilt collectively to an entire group of people and then using it to justify violence against them.
Jim Geraghty has a list of examples of other people using the term in a political context, but some of them are actually appropriate, others less so. Eugene Robinson's reference to the Reconstruction Era lie that black men went around raping white women as a form of blood libel fits the above description, Andrew Sullivan's use of the term to describe anti-gay-rights politicians accusing gays of all being child molesters is similarly appropriate. It's about using a falsehood to establish collective guilt in order to justify collective punishment, not mean things said about an individual person.
