More Education Needed

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach [marvelous name!] says that Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" is justified. 

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.

The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts [murdering children] the charge would not have been a libel.

In recent years we have seen words like "genocide" and "holocaust" applied to acts, which, while horrible, are on a much smaller scale or less redolent of evil than the original events that gave rise to these terms' widespread use. Hyperbole goes uncontested, while an appropriate use of an historical term is criticized. Perhaps Governor Palin is not as ignorant nor her critics as educated as we have been led to believe.