Citations:blood libel

English citations of blood libel

[Note: not grouped and formatted correctly / quick scan from NYT mostly focusing on usage beyond primary case of “blood libel” WP article to help verify the “extensions” are covered]

1. • 1989 December 5, Herbert Mitgang, “Books of The Time: Dozen Tales of the Black Experience”, in The New York Times‎^[1]:

     During the yellow fever plague a form of blood libel is imposed on the blacks in Philadelphia; they are said to be both responsible for and immune to sickness because of the color of their skin.

   • 1989 September 3, Leon Wieseltier, “At Auschwitz, Decency Dies Again”, in The New York Times‎^[2]:

     Mr. Buchanan seems unaware that the blood libel was an achievement of his own church, its original instrument for oppressing Jews from the 12th to the 20th centuries. If he insists on talking about blood libels, he should hang his head down.

   • 1991 August 22, John Kifner, “Tension in Brooklyn: Clashes Persist in Crown Heights for 3d Night in Row”, in The New York Times‎^[3]:

     The service, initially intended to be to be a quick, low-key prelude to having Mr. Rosenbaum's body flown home for burial, soon became a forum for Hasidic leaders to denounce Mayor Dinkin's handling of the situation and what many called an unprovoked attack on Jews incited by black “agitators” from outside Crown Heights.
     ‘A Blood Libel’
     “This was a one-sided attack on the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Butman, delivering a eulogy to the crowd assembled along Eastern Parkway. “This is a blood libel that the community of Crown Heights has been accused of.”

   • 1995 December 11, Carey Goldberg, The New York Times‎^[4]:

     A sprinkling of protesters from Women in Green – a settlers' group – outside the arena accused the Peres government of planning to “crush the opposition,” and another unsigned leaflet claimed the government had spread a “blood libel” against religious right-wingers, blaming them for the assassination.

   • 1996 June 2, Tina Rosenberg, “Essay: In the Shadow of Goebbels”, in The New York Times‎^[5]:

     But under its polished surface the book is in fact a sophisticated blood libel. A look at just one sentence is enough to show why. In a description of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, Mr. Irving writes, “The upshot of the Jewish campaign overseas was that Goebbels secured from Hitler – or so he claimed – approval to threaten a short, sharp counterboycott of the Jews.” A “counterboycott” provoked by a “Jewish campaign overseas” – in other words, the Jews had it coming. These are not Goebbels's words, they are Mr. Irving's, and the book is strung with such gems. Consistent with his theory that the gas chambers did not exist, Mr. Irving calls Auschwitz “the most brutal of all Himmler's slave-labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate.” By my count, the word “holocaust” appears once in the book; it refers to the British bombing of Hamburg.

   • 1998 December 20, Geoffrey Whitcroft, “(Review) Family Business: The House of Rothchild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848”, in The New York Times‎^[6]:

     More than 30 years later came the Damascus affair of 1840, one of the turning points in modern Jewish history.
     
     There was a coarse blood-libel in that town in the Ottoman empire when a Catholic friar mysteriously disappeared. After prolonged torture, several Jews confessed to ritual murder.

   • 1999 March 18, Deborah Sontag, “Israeli Politician Convicted of Corruption”, in The New York Times‎^[7]:

     “Deri waged a war against the police during the investigation, and against the prosecution during the trial,” the judge said as Mr. Deri fixed his gaze on the courtroom floor. “Deri alleged they were trying not only to ruin him but to ruin his party, that they were conducting blood libel against him.”

   • 2000 October 28, (transcript), “THE SENATE CAMPAIGN; Excerpts From the 3rd and Last Debate Between Clinton and Lazio”, in The New York Times‎^[8]:

     [REP. RICK] LAZIO: ... It's very difficult to accept that you are a consistent supporter when you stand on the sidelines while Suha Arafat issues a blood libel suggesting that Israelis have been orchestrating an attack on Palestinian women and children with poison.

   • 2001 May 13, Clyde Haberman, “Assad Greets the Pope: Welcome, Man of Peace. Let's Go Hate My Enemy.”, in The New York Times‎^[9]:

     No sooner had he arrived in Damascus, retracing the steps of St. Paul, than Syria's new president, Bashar al-Assad, delivered a bare-knuckled attack on Jews. This went beyond formulaic denunciations of Israel. It raised the specter of the blood libel of Jews as Christ-killers – those, he said, “who try to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ.”

   • 2002 April 25, Serge Schmemann, “MIDEAST TURMOIL: THE AFTERMATH; Israel Eases Opposition to Inquiry Into Jenin Attack”, in The New York Times‎^[10]:

     The Israelis wanted to ensure that the focus would be more closely on military aspects of the operation, to support their contention that the widely reported devastation in the refugee camp would be perceived as a necessary response to resistance from armed Palestinians over eight days of fighting. They also hoped that the panel would refute Palestinian claims that there had been a massacre in Jenin, which Israelis have characterized as “blood libel.”

   • 2002 May 7, Todd S. Purdum with Steven Erlanger, “MIDEAST TURMOIL: DIPLOMACY; SHARON PROPOSES BYPASSING ARAFAT IN FUTURE TALKS”, in The New York Times‎^[11]:

     In a speech here tonight to the Anti-Defamation League, Mr. Sharon expressed relief that the United Nations had been forced to abandon a proposed fact-finding mission into Israel's actions in the Jenin refugee camp, calling Palestinian accusations of a massacre there “a Palestinian blood libel.”

   • 2002 September 17, Nicholas Wade, “SCIENTIST AT WORK: Steven Pinker: In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature”, in The New York Times‎^[12]:

     And he chides the sociobiology critics for turning a scholarly debate “into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel.” In a recent case, two anthropologists accused Dr. James Neel, a founder of modern human genetics, and Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropologist, of killing the Yanomamö people of Brazil to test genetic theories of human behavior, a charge Dr. Pinker analyzes as without basis in fact.

   • 2004 December 29, A.O. Scott, “Putting a Still-Vexed Play in a Historical Context”, in The New York Times‎^[13]:

     None of which quite explains the character of Shylock, or dispels the taint of blood libel from the play – an impossibility in any case.

   • 2005 January 7, A. O. Scott, “Listings: The Merchant of Venice”, in The New York Times‎^[14]:

     But his villainy, however much it smacks of blood libel, cannot be discarded without compromising the play's complex ideas about justice and duty, and Mr. Radford does not try to wash away the stain of anti-Semitism that is woven into the heart of his source.

   • 2005 April 6, Mel Gussow, Charles McGrath, “Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89”, in The New York Times‎^[15]:

     A few people in the radical black community tried to spread a story that Jewish doctors were deliberately infecting black children with H.I.V., and Mr. Bellow objected to this “blood libel” in an article printed in The Chicago Tribune.

   • 2008 July 13, Marilyn Stasio, “Crime/review: Dangerous Lessons”, in The New York Times‎^[16]:

     But when Eddie takes Jack's suggestion and begins researching his own father for his term paper on evil, tragedy follows tragedy in the fateful manner of Greek drama, an art form Jack seems not to cover in his course, although it speaks directly to one of his central themes: the “blood libel” of generational evil.

   • 2009 August 24, Isabel Kershner, “Accusation of Organ Theft Stokes Ire in Israel”, in The New York Times‎^[17]:

     As the furor in Israel over the article gathered into a diplomatic storm revolving around questions of anti-Semitism and freedom of speech, Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the article, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, was “outrageous” and compared it to a “blood libel,” referring to medieval anti-Semitic accusations that Jews ritually killed gentile children and collected their blood.

(Currently used citations from entry)

1. The libelous accusation that Jews murder non-Jewish children to use their blood for their religious rituals and holidays.
   • 1911 August 27, Herman Bernstein, “Ritual Murder Libel Encouraged by Russian Court”, in The New York Times‎^[18]:

     The Jews of Russia are accused of having murdered a Christian child for ritual use. The blood libel against the Jews, which cropped up from time to time in various countries for centuries, has long been established as a myth invented by anti-Semites.

   • 2002, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Religious violence between Christians and Jews‎^[19], page 99:

     The Jewish reaction to blood libels appears less articulated than we might have expected, because although it denied any Jewish culpability, it internalized some of the narratives which nourished the ritual murder accusations.

2. (by extension) Any false or purportedly false accusation of murder of a non-Jew by a Jewish person or organization.
   • 1982 September 20, David K. Shipler, “Killings a Shock, Israeli Aides Say”, in The New York Times‎^[20]:

     The Israeli Cabinet, meeting in emergency session, issued a statement tonight calling allegations of Israeli responsibility a “blood libel.”

   • 1984 November 13, David Margolick, “Trial in Sharon Libel Suit vs. TIME Opens Today”, in The New York Times‎^[21]:

     Charges “Blood Libel.” Mr. Sharon, the architect of Israel's war in Lebanon and now Minister of Industry and Commerce, has charged that he was libeled in 1983 by a Time article suggesting that he condoned, if not directly encouraged, the September 1982 massacre by Christian Phalangists of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut.

   • 1987, Uri Dan, Blood libel: the inside story of General Ariel Sharon's history-making suit against Time magazine‎^[22], page 108:

     [ Ariel Sharon: ] “Time published a blood libel about me. How the hell do you settle a matter like this? A blood libel you fight!”

3. (by extension) Any false or purportedly false accusation of guilt, especially of guilt in mass murder or homicide.
   • 1989 September 3, Leon Wieseltier, “At Auschwitz, Decency Dies Again”, in The New York Times‎^[23]:

     In Washington, the conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan refined the analogy between Jews and their killers, and wrote that those who call for sensitivity to the Jews in this matter are guilty of “a blood libel” against Catholicism.

   • 1989 September 12, Patrick J. Buchanan, “‘We Did Not Go to Auschwitz to Be Beaten’; In Defense of Pius XII”, in The New York Times‎^[24]:

     What I called blood libel was the charge that Pope Pius XII, and my church, were moral accessories to mass murder.

   • 1997, Shanto Iyengar, Richard Reeves (editors), Do the Media Govern?: Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America‎^[25], page 44:

     [ John Seigenthaler to Oliver Stone re JFK: ] “Is there any regret on your part for what I consider to be a blood libel on Lyndon Johnson for that accusation of murder?”

   • 1998 February 1, Alan Ryan, “Hot Spots (review of The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff)”, in The New York Times‎^[26]:

     The fantasies of blood libel that Bosnian Serbs retailed about Bosnian Muslims were the fantasies that Rhinelanders had centuries earlier retailed about the Jews they had murdered.

4. More generally, any canard or virulent lie about someone.
   • 2000 November 21, Josh Marshall, quoting Peter Deutsch, “TPM Editor's Blog”, in Talking Points Memo‎^[27]:

     Listen to Florida Democrat Peter Deutsch last night on Crossfire: “Let me just talk a little bit about... the worst statements I have ever heard probably in my life about anything. I mean, almost a blood libel by the Republicans towards Al Gore, saying that he was trying to stop men and women in uniform that are serving this country from voting.” .... You don't just toss around charges that the possible next president of the United States is conspiring to take the vote away from American soldiers overseas. Given the volatility of the moment and the divisions already existing in American society it really is almost like a blood libel. Almost.

   • 2006 October 15, Frank Rich, “The Gay Old Party Comes Out”, in The New York Times‎^[28]:

     Bush administration allies exploited the former Congressman's predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It's the kind of blood libel that in another era was spread about Jews.

   • 2006 November 25, Andy Newman, “Standoff at Miami Papers Ends in Cartoonist's Arrest”, in The New York Times‎^[29]:

     This week, Mr. Fiedler accused an op-ed contributor for El Nuevo Herald of “blood libel” for suggesting that a Herald reporter who broke the Martí story had ties to Cuba's spy agency. In an editor's note, Mr. Castelló called the spy claim unfounded.

   • 2011 January 12, Michael D. Shear, ““Blood Libel” in the Pages of History”, in The New York Times‎^[30]:

     The phrase “blood libel” dates back to antiquity.... In more recent times, it has been appropriated by some to mean simply a virulent lie stated about someone.