On July 14 representatives of the so-called "Center for Medical Progress," a group described by NBC as "an anti-abortion group" that for three years had "posed as a company procuring tissue for medical research," released heavily edited videotape of a lunch with Planned Parenthood executives, ostensibly to discuss "participation in tissue donation programs that support lifesaving scientific research."

Anti-abortion activists, their anti-birth-control allies, and the political forces that pander to both immediately seized on the tapes as clear and incontrovertible "evidence" that Planned Parenthood was "dismembering babies" and "selling the parts."

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

In the eyes of its enemies any and all of Planned Parenthood's activities are, quite often literally, anathema.

Doctors and nurses who provide abortions, in their eyes, are murderers.

The women who choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, women whose lives are in danger or who are victims of rape or incest, are branded as complicit in the crime.

Providing information about artificial means of birth control is tantamount to blasphemy . . . despite the documented fact that the more people know about and have access to contraception, the fewer abortions are needed and performed.

It matters not that the vast majority of Americans, and more important, the vast majority of American women support both abortion and birth control. The good people of Planned Parenthood, in the eyes of their single-minded opponents, are murderers, ghouls and profiteers.

Where have we heard this sort of thing before?

To label a person, an organization, an institution or an entire people "baby killers" is the oldest form of "blood libel," a particularly vicious, incendiary mean-spirited lying (to call it by its proper name) with a long, dishonorable and deadly history.

From the medieval cult of St. Simon of Trent to Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ; from the Holocaust to today's anti-semitism on the air and on line, the blood libel lives.

It has been used as a propaganda ploy in every war ever fought in which innocent people were killed.

It has been applied to all our enemies and even to our own soldiers.

The most perfect analogy to the attack on Planned Parenthood, however, dates to May 1934.

That month's special "ritual murder" edition of Nazi war criminal "Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer, elaborated in detail the 12th century myth that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. And nothing sounds more like the false charges being leveled against Planned Parenthood.

But the label "baby killer" is a powerful tool and for those desperate to make a point, almost irresistible, despite the reality that people have committed real murders, all too often on a massive scale, (the basis of such lies).

Indeed, one or another form of such "blood libel" has motived killers and worse in every century since the 12th, including our own.

For those who believe abortion, any abortion, for any reason, is tantamount murder, rational and even biblical argument in support of Planned Parenthood is pointless.

For those of us who think differently, Planned Parenthood has a long and distinguished history, serving for many Americans as their ONLY source of information about avoiding pregnancy, and for those in desperate need, the ONLY source of safe, legal, pregnancy termination.

By law it uses no federal money for abortions.

By choice its work is supported by millions.

As the New England Journal of Medicine put it: "The inquiries revealed no law broken by Planned Parenthood . . . every person in this country has benefitted from research using fetal tissue . . .This attack represents a betrayal of the people whose lives could be save by the research and a violation of that most fundamental duty of medicine . . . ."