History shows how Torture is an effective tool to get at the truth you are sure is there...and what higher calling to use than than in the name of God.
Clearly in this historical case can be used as a cautionary tale of how the end can justify any means to get at the truth.
The Damascus Blood Libel Episode:
In February 1840, a Capuchin monk known as Father Thomas disappeared in Damascus. Because he was a Sardinian under French protection, the monks of the order immediately turned to the French consul, the comte de Ratti-Menton, and asked him to investigate. Exercising his rights as consular protector, Ratti-Menton rounded up several Jews as suspects and proceeded to interrogate and torture them under the baseless suspicion that the disappearance was part of a Jewish plot of ritual murder. In the first few days of the investigation, dozens of Jewish children were imprisoned along with the leading members of Damascus Jewry. Under torture, some of the prisoners "confessed"; others died or converted to Islam. The blood libel accusation spread like wildfire among the Ottoman Christians to engulf the Jews of Rhodes, Beirut, and Smyrna. Although the accusation was a familiar calumny in the stock and trade of Western anti-Semitism, the results of what has come to be known as the Damascus Affair marked a revolutionary turning point for the Jews of the East. For in the wake of this tragic event, the welfare of Ottoman Jewry emerged as an issue to be placed repeatedly, on the international agenda. Western Jewish defense of the Damascene community would forge new ties of solidarity, both sentimental and institutional, between the Ashkenazim of Europe and the Sephardim of Muslim lands.
Immediately after the incarceration of the innocent suspects, a six- month-long campaign to obtain their release began throughout the world. At the time, Damascus was a fanatical city of between 80,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. Since 1831, Syria had been under the control of the viceroy of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, not the Ottomans. France
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Jane S. Gerber. The Jews of France, Page 229