Excerpt from NewWorldEncyclopedia: (Carthaginian)Child Sacrifice: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Carthage
Child sacrifice It is a matter of dispute whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. This may have been calumny, a form of blood libel. Plutarch (ca. 46–120 C.E.) mentions the practice, as do Tertullian, Orosius ,and Diodorus Siculus. Livy and Polybius do not. The Hebrew Bible also mentions child sacrifice practiced by the Caananites, ancestors of the Carthaginians, and by some Israelites. According to Diodorus Siculus, "There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."
Modern archaeology in formerly Punic areas has in fact found a number of large cemeteries for children and infants. But there is some argument that the reports of child sacrifice were based on a misconception, later used as blood libel by the Romans who destroyed the city. These cemeteries may have been used as graves for stillborn infants or children who died very early.
Excerpt From Prison Planet that also uses "blood libel" in generic sense: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/August2006/250806Rove.htm
"Karl Rove's Blood Libel"
TOLEDO, Ohio -- Chris Floyd, August 25 2006,Presidential adviser Karl Rove criticized a federal judge's order for an immediate end to the government's warrantless surveillance program, saying Wednesday such a program might have prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Rove said the government should be free to listen if al Qaeda is calling someone within the U.S. "Imagine if we could have done that before 9/11. It might have been a different outcome," he said.
It's time to be done with the dangerous fiction that this kind of thing is just "hardball politics" – or indeed, politics of any kind, as the term is normally understood in a democracy. What Rove is giving voice to here is nothing less than the new blood libel of our age: that those who oppose the Bush Administration's unconstitutional actions are opening the door to a new 9/11. The implication is clear: anyone who speaks up for the Constitution is working for the death of innocent Americans. They are, by definition, traitors. Thus they deserve what traitors get: death.
Rove is being only slightly less circumspect than the innumerable Bushist sycophants and bootlickers yapping in the echo chamber of the right-wing media, who say openly that pro-Constitution citizens are actively yearning for another 9/11; they want the terrorists "to win;" they want more Americans to die. Every day this drumbeat grows louder: traitors are among us, terrorist-lovers are among us, they're going to get us killed, we must stop them – at all costs.
(snip) This isn't politics. This isn't partisanship. This is blood libel, and it will end in blood – sooner, not later.
Quotes:
Alan Dershowitz 9/1/2010: “Nonetheless, Richard Goldstone issued a blood libel against Israel, accusing its leaders of deliberately setting out to maximize civilian deaths.”
Alan Dershowitz 1/12/2011: “The term ‘blood libel’ has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse.” You don’t say. He continues: “Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People,its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim.””
