Alison Weir,
a decent woman
has done her homework and come up with a solid case against
Jews, especially
Zionist crazies.
The rest follows. She plays dirty - by the standards of Jews because she uses
evidence that they are guilty as Hell.
Believing
her is made much easier by knowing something of their track record of evil which
includes political manipulation, slave trading, narcotics trading, gun running,
major fraud and
Cultural Genocide. An overview is at
Israeli Human Organ Harvesting Scandal. A little more is at
Organ Theft.
Israeli Organ Harvesting From Moldova To Palestine
QUOTE
Israeli Organ Harvesting: From Moldova To Palestine
In this photograph taken March 22, 2007, Vasile
Dimineti holds a picture of his 24-year-old son, who died a year after
selling his kidney. The family lives in the impoverished Moldovan village of
Mingir, where about 40 of its 7,000 residents are thought to have sold a
kidney. AFP photo/Daniel Mihailescu/Files
In August Sweden’s largest newspaper published an article suggesting that
Israel had been taking Palestinian internal organs. The article, by veteran
photojournalist Donald Bostrom, called for an international investigation.
Israel and its partisans immediately cried “anti-Semitism,” and
Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin asserted that the story was “the tip of the
iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.”
The fact is, however, that Israeli organ harvesting—sometimes with
Israeli governmental funding and the participation of high Israeli
officials, prominent Israeli physicians, and Israeli government
ministries—has been documented for many years. Among the victims have been
Palestinians.
Nancy
Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at
the University of California Berkeley, the founder of
Organs Watch
[ defunct ], and the
author of scholarly books on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream
media call upon when they need expert commentary.
While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers come from numerous
nations and ethnicities, including Americans and Arabs, “Israel,” she
states, “is at the top. It has tentacles reaching out worldwide.”
In a lecture last year she explained that Israeli organ traffickers “have
a pyramid system at work that’s awesome...they have brokers everywhere, bank
accounts everywhere; they’ve got recruiters, they’ve got translators,
they’ve got travel agents who set up the visas.”
But this is no ordinary business. Organ traffickers prey on the world’s
poorest, most desperate citizens, promising them what seem like astronomical
sums of money ($1,000 to $10,000) in return for vital internal organs. As
Scheper-Hughes points out, organ trafficking consists of “paying the poor
and the hungry to slowly dismantle their bodies.”
Organ sales have been illegal in most countries for years, and the
Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime includes in its definition
of human exploitation the extraction of organs for profit. Until very
recently, however, the Israeli government not only permitted organ
trafficking, it funded it.
Israelis are the leaders in “transplant tourism”—traveling to other
nations to buy internal organs. While affluent individuals from numerous
countries engage in this practice, Israel is unique in several ways.
First, Israelis partake at an extraordinarily high rate. According to a
2001 BBC report, Israelis buy more kidneys per capita than any other
population.
Second, Israelis have the lowest donor rate in the world—one-third to
one-fifth that of Europe—due in part to beliefs that Jewish religious law
prohibits organ removal as “desecration of the body.”
Third, the Israeli government has enabled it. In testimony before a
congressional subcommittee in 2001, Scheper-Hughes described what she termed
Israel’s “national ”˜program’ of transplant tourism.” For many years the
Israeli health system subsidized its citizens’ “transplant holidays,”
reimbursing Israelis $80,000 for medical operations abroad, with the
remaining costs largely covered by government-subsidized insurance plans. In
addition, Israel’s Ministry of Defense has been directly involved, as
members of the ministry or those closely related to them accompany
transplant junkets.
Israeli traffickers have utilized people from diverse locations—the West
Bank and Gaza, the Philippines, Eastern Europe. A BBC report described the
situation in Europe’s poorest country—homeland of Foreign Minister Avigdor
Lieberman—where 90 percent of the people earn less than $2 a day: “Hundreds
of Israelis have created a production line that starts in the villages of
Moldova, where men today are walking around with one kidney.”
In China not long ago an Israeli paid a broker $100,000 for a kidney
transplant from an 18-year-old girl. She herself received $5,000, and died
following surgery. In Brazil a legislative commission found that Israeli
traffickers no longer were content with just kidneys; they had begun
inquiring into additional body parts—lungs, livers and corneas.
In her testimony, Scheper-Hughes pointed out that “The sale of human
organs and tissues requires that certain disadvantaged individuals,
populations, and even nations have been reduced to the role of ”suppliers.’
It is a scenario in which only certain bodies are broken, dismembered,
fragmented, transported, processed, and sold in the interests of a more
socially advantaged population...of receivers.”
In a 2008 lecture Scheper-Hughes discussed the motivations of Israeli
traffickers. One was greed, she explained. The other was “revenge,
restitution, reparation for the Holocaust.” She said some Israeli brokers
and doctors had told her: “It’s kind of ”˜an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth.’ We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we
can. The world owes it to us.”
Organ Theft
At times traffickers coerce reluctant sellers.
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, the
alleged [ also charged, convicted, sentenced & imprisoned - got off with two
years ] trafficker recently arrested in an FBI sweep in New Jersey,
reportedly carried a gun; when a potential organ seller wanted to back out,
Rosenbaum would use his finger to simulate firing at the person’s head.
Rosenbaum, believed to be part of a ring centered in Israel, is the first
case of trafficking to be prosecuted in the U.S.
More often organ theft involves dead bodies—or those alleged to be dead.
Israel’s very first successful heart transplant, in fact, used a stolen
heart.
In 1968 Avraham Sadegat unexpectedly died two days after being
hospitalized for a stroke. When his family was able to retrieve his body
(the hospital initially refused to release it) they found his chest covered
with bandages—odd, they thought, for a stroke victim. Upon removing the
bandages they discovered that the heart was missing.
During this time, the press was announcing Israel’s first heart
transplant. The family began to raise questions, but the hospital denied any
connection. After the family raised a media furor, petitioned three cabinet
ministers, and signed a document that they would not sue, the hospital
finally admitted it had used Sadegat’s heart.
An Israeli newspaper quoted Sadegat’s tearful wife: “From the moment he
entered the hospital, they apparently saw him only as a potential source of
organs and not as a man in need of treatment. They only thought about how to
do the deed without us knowing.” Sadegat’s medical condition pre-organ
removal is unclear. According to an Israeli media report, “Once a heart
stops beating, it is no longer fit for transplantation.”
Sadegat’s family was Israeli. Had they been Palestinian, it is doubtful
they would have been able to force a hospital confession—and suggestions
that the first Israeli heart transplant utilized a stolen organ would, quite
likely, be termed blood libels.
Yehuda Hiss, Keeper of the Morgue
Perhaps one of the most long-term and high-level cases of organ theft
concerns Dr. Yehuda Hiss
[ allowed to get away with it ], Israel’s chief pathologist and, from 1988 to 2004,
director of Israel’s state morgue, the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic
Medicine.
One of the first indications of malfeasance occurred in 1998 and
concerned a Scottish tourist named Alisdair Sinclair, who died under
questionable circumstances after being taken into Israeli custody.
His family brought his body home and found that it had been autopsied.
They commissioned a second autopsy at Glasgow University and discovered that
Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone, the hyoid, were missing. The
British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel.
A heart was then sent to Scotland, but when the family requested a DNA
test to confirm its identity, Hiss refused, citing prohibitive cost. DNA
tests were eventually conducted but proved inconclusive. According to
several reports, a researcher had put in a request for a hyoid bone around
the time of Sinclair’s death and eventually received a bill for shipping
costs.
Over the following years Hiss was often the center of accusations. An
Israeli newspaper published an investigative report charging that diverse
body parts—“legs, thighs, ovaries, breasts and testicles”—had been removed
without permission and sold to medical institutions. The bodies were stuffed
with broomsticks and cotton wool.
Although government investigations confirmed the main facts, little was
done, and complaints continued—often from parents of dead Israeli soldiers.
Finally, in 2004, Israel’s health minister removed Hiss as director of the
morgue, while retaining him as Israel’s chief pathologist.
Hiss had been involved in previous controversies concerning the Israeli
government. In one he was suspected of falsifying a DNA test in an
investigation into the “Yemenite Children Affair,” in which a thousand
children of immigrants disappeared. (Many believe that some, at least, were
adopted out, for pay.) Hiss has also been accused of falsifying evidence to
the commission investigating the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin.
Palestinian Victims
For decades Palestinians have charged Israel with taking organs from
Palestinians its soldiers wounded or killed.
In her subcommittee testimony Scheper-Hughes stated, “Human rights groups
in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain
Palestinians by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical
institute in Tel Aviv.”
A 1990 article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, for
Middle East Affairs reported “widespread anxiety over organ thefts
which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in
December of 1987,” and quoted a forensic physician: “There are indications
that...organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies
during the first year or year and a half.”
Such statements were largely ignored, often portrayed as anti-Semitic
exaggeration. According to The Forward magazine, however, the
Israeli government corroborated them in 2001. The Forward reports
that an investigation into Hiss revealed that he “seemed to view every body
that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game
for organ harvesting.”
Over the years a great many Palestinian bodies have “ended up” in the
Israeli morgue.
Israeli forces have frequently taken custody of Palestinians they have
wounded or killed. Sometimes the bodies were kept in Israel, buried in
unidentified graves in what are known as “cemeteries of numbers.” In other
cases they were returned late at night days later with crudely stitched
naval-to-chin incisions, and Israel requiring the bereaved families to bury
their children, husbands, and brothers immediately—sometimes with the
electricity shut off—and Israeli soldiers overseeing the funeral.
In 2005 an Israeli soldier described a military doctor who gave “medics
lessons” using the body of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces.
Haaretz reports: “The soldier said that the Palestinian’s body had been
riddled with bullets and that some of his internal organs had spilled out.
The doctor pronounced the man dead and then ”˜took out a knife and began to
cut off parts of the body. He explained the various parts to us—the membrane
that covers the lungs, the layers of the skin, the liver. ”˜I didn’t say
anything because I was still new in the army. Two of the medics moved away,
and one of them threw up. It was all done very brutally. It was simply
contempt for the body.’”
Palestinians, of course, are an unusually vulnerable population. Human
rights reports have documented a situation in which Palestinians have few
real rights: Israeli forces have killed civilians with impunity, imprisoned
massive numbers without charges or trials, abused prisoners, and
strip-searched children. And just as Palestinians have little ability to
protect their bodies when they’re living, they’re equally unable to prevent
their desecration when they’re dead. By Israel’s own admission, Israeli
authorities cut open Palestinian corpses without permission of the families,
without public transparency, and without, it appears, normal autopsy
reports.
At the same time, some Israelis hold extremist views regarding organ
extraction. In 1996 Jewish Week reported that Rabbi Yitzhak
Ginsburgh, a leader of the Lubavitch sect of Judaism and the dean of a
religious Jewish school in a West Bank settlement, had stated: “If a Jew
needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to
save him? The Torah would probably permit that.”
Ginsburgh elaborated: “Jewish life has infinite value. There is something
infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
While the Israeli government briefly arrested Ginsburgh, and most
Israelis decry such beliefs, an Israeli scholar on Jewish scriptural views
and ethnic chauvinism said: “The sad thing is, these statements are in our
books.” He pointed out that while such Talmudic texts were “purely
theoretical” at the time they were written, now they’re being cited “in
circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.”
Dr. A. Clare Brandabur, an American professor, writes that information in
the Swedish article resonated with reports she heard during the first
intifada.
She described interviewing the head of the Red Crescent in Gaza,
mentioning “reports of shootings of Palestinian children at times when there
were no ”˜clashes’ going on—a solitary 6-year-old entering his schoolyard in
the morning with his book-bag on his back. The soldiers abducted the wounded
child at gunpoint, then his body would be returned a few days later having
undergone an ”˜autopsy at Abu Kabir Hospital.’”
She asked the director “if he had considered the possibility that these
killings were being done for organ transplant, since...it is not allowed to
take Jewish organs to save a Jewish life, but it is allowed to take the
organs of non-Jews to save Jewish lives.”
He had “suspected such things,” he replied, “but since they had no access
to the records of Abu Kabir Hospital, there was no way to verify these
suspicions.”
The Swedish newspaper’s call for an investigation into Israel’s treatment
of Palestinian bodies is now being echoed by others. Such an investigation
could dispel inaccurate suspicions, absolve the innocent, and discover the
guilty.
Israel and its powerful advocates abroad are doing their best to prevent
that from happening.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew. An Internet
petition calling for an investigation can be
viewed by
clicking this link. An expanded and footnoted version of this article
can be viewed on the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs' Web site.
UNQUOTE
Alison Weir is
a decent woman; she is against
Zionist crazies.
The rest follows.
From
Israeli Organ
Harvesting
QUOTE
Israeli Organ Harvesting
Just as in a multitude
of other cases, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide resources to
interfere with the investigative process, notes Alison Weir.
Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper
published an article containing shocking material: testimony and
circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting
internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years.
Worse yet, some of the
information reported in the article suggests that in some instances
Palestinians may have been captured with this macabre purpose in mind. In the article, “Our sons
plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Boström writes that
Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men
and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious
accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”
An army of Israeli officials
and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Boström and the
newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was
reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An
Israeli official called it “hate porn.” Commentary magazine wrote
that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European
funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.” Numerous people likened the article
to the medieval “Blood
Libel,” (widely refuted stories that Jews killed
people to use their blood in religious rituals). Even some pro-Palestinian
writers joined in the criticism, expressing scepticism.
The fact is, however, that
substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft,
and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given
such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might
otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up
significant information. Below are a few examples of
previous reports on this topic.
Israel’s first heart
transplant
Israel’s very first, historic
heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent
or consulting his family. In December 1968 a man named
Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) (2)
died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was
“doing well.” After initially refusing to
release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally
turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper
body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who
had suffered a stroke. When they removed the
bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages,
and the heart was missing.
During this time, the
headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial
shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and
demanded answers.
The hospital at first denied
that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but
the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet
ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document
promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been
used. The hospital explained that
it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without
the family's consent. (3) (The United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its
definition of human exploitation.)
Indications that the removal
of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed.
Director of forensic
medicine on missing organs
A 1990 article in the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled “Autopsies and Executions”
by Mary Barrett reports on the grotesque killings of young Palestinians. It
includes an interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazalch, the former chief health
official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of
forensic medicine and autopsies. Barrett asks him about “the
widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West
Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.” He responded:
"There are indications that
for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed
from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just
too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If
someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal
organs, what will people assume?” (4)
Mysterious Scottish death
In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair
Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at
Ben Gurion airport.
His family was informed of
the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three
weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair's corpse home.
[Alisdair’s brother] says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different
option: burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of
about $1,300.”
The family scraped up the
money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University
of Glasgow. It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were
missing. At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel. The J report states:
“A heart said to be
Sinclair's was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James
wanted the [Israeli] Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm
that this heart was indeed their brother's, but the Institute's director,
Professor Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by
some sources at $1,500.” Despite repeated requests
from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist's and police reports,
Israeli officials refused to release either. (5,6,7)
Israeli government
officials raise questions
Palestinian journalist Khalid
Amayreh reports in an article in CCUN:
“In January, 2002, an Israeli
cabinet minister tacitly admitted that organs taken from the bodies of
Palestinian victims might have been used for transplants in Jewish patients
without the knowledge of the Palestinian victims’ families.
“The minister, Nessim Dahan,
said in response to a question by an Arab Knesset member that he couldn’t
deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the
Israeli army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.
“‘I couldn’t say for sure
that something like that didn’t happen.’”
Amayreh writes that the
Knesset member who posed the question said that he “had received ‘credible
evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Kabir
extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies
of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and the
West Bank.” (8)
Israel’s chief pathologist
removed from post for stealing body parts
For a number of years there
were allegations that Israel’s leading pathologist was stealing body parts.
In 2001 the Israeli national news service reported:
“… the parents of soldier
Ze’ev Buzgallo who was killed in a Golan Heights military training accident,
are filing a petition with the High Court of Justice calling for the
immediate suspension of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and that criminal charges be filed
against him. Hiss serves as the director of the Abu Kabir Forensic
Institute….According to the parents, the body of their son was used for
medical experimentation without their consent, experiments authorized by
Hiss. (9) In 2002 the service reported:
“The revelation of illegally
stored body parts in the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute has prompted MK Anat
Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, to demand the immediate
suspension of the director, Prof. Yehuda Hiss."
Alisdair Sinclair’s death had
first alerted authorities to Hiss’s malfeasance in 1998, though nothing was
done for years. The Forward reported:
“In 2001, an Israeli Health
Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking
body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission
during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research
and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never
charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running
the state morgue, following years of complaints.” (10)
Harvesting kidneys from
impoverished communities
According to the Economist, a
kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. “Donors were
recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to
visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each
paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday”; they pretended they were
relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.” (11)
In 2004 a legislative
commission in Brazil reported, “At least 30 Brazilians have sold their
kidneys to an international human organ trafficking ring for transplants
performed in South Africa, with Israel providing most of the funding.” According to an IPS report:
“The recipients were mostly Israelis, who receive health insurance
reimbursements of 70,000 to 80,000 dollars for life-saving medical
procedures performed abroad.”
IPS reports:
The Brazilians were recruited
in Brazil’s most impoverished neighbourhoods and were paid $10,000 per
kidney, “but as ‘supply’ increased, the payments fell as low as 3,000
dollars.” The trafficking had been organized by a retired Israeli police
officer, who said “he did not think he was committing a crime, given that
the transaction is considered legal by his country's government.”
The Israeli embassy issued a
statement denying any participation by the Israeli government in the illegal
trade of human organs but said it did recognize that its citizens, in
emergency cases, could undergo organ transplants in other countries, "in a
legal manner, complying with international norms," and with the financial
support of their medical insurance.
However, IPS reports that the
commission chair termed the Israeli stance “at the very least
‘anti-ethical’, adding that trafficking can only take place on a major scale
if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system.”
He went on to state that the resources provided by the Israeli health system
"were a determining factor" that allowed the network to function. (12)
Tel Aviv hospital head
promotes organ trafficking
IPS goes on to report:
“Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who
heads the Organs Watch project at the US University of California, Berkeley,
testified to the Pernambuco legislative commission that international
trafficking of human organs began some 12 years ago, promoted by Zacki
Shapira, former director of a hospital in Tel Aviv.
“Shapira performed more than
300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other
countries, such as Turkey. The recipients are very wealthy or have very good
health insurance, and the ‘donors’ are very poor people from Eastern Europe,
Philippines and other developing countries, said Scheper-Hughes, who
specialises in medical anthropology.”
Israel prosecutes organ
traffickers
In 2007 Israel’s Ha’aretz
newspaper reported that two men confessed to persuading “Arabs from the
Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally
ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” They then would refuse
to pay them.
The paper reported that the
two were part of a criminal ring that included an Israeli surgeon. According
to the indictment, the surgeon sold the kidneys he harvested for between
$125,000 and $135,000. (13)
Earlier that year another
Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, reported that ten members of an
Israeli organ smuggling ring targeting Ukrainians had been arrested. (14)
In still another 2007 story,
the Jerusalem Post reported that “Professor Zaki Shapira, one of Israel's
leading transplant surgeons, was arrested in Turkey on Thursday on suspicion
of involvement in an organ trafficking ring. According to the report, the
transplants were arranged in Turkey and took place at private hospitals in
Istanbul.”
Israeli organ trafficking
comes to the US?
In July of this year even US
media reported on the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn,
recently arrested by federal officials in a massive corruption sweep in New
Jersey that netted mayors, government officials and a number of prominent
rabbis. Boström opens his article with this incident.
According to the federal
complaint, Rosenbaum, who has close ties to Israel, said that he had been
involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years. A US Attorney
explained: "His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney
for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000." (15)
This is reportedly the first
case of international organ trafficking in the US
University of California
anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who informed the
FBI about Rosenbaum seven years ago, says she heard reports that he had held
donors at gunpoint to ensure they followed through on agreements to “donate”
their organs. (16)
Israel’s organ donor
problems
Israel has an extraordinarily
small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service
Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the
ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have
organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population
holds such cards. (17)
“According to statistics from
the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a
transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis
were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but
only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”
According to Ynet, the low
incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an
uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law
performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a
similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed
silently.” (18, 19)
The Swedish article reports
that ‘Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of
dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that
ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the 1990s. Jerusalem Post wrote
that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s
example shortly.”
“Half of the kidneys
transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought
illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health
authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it.
At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country
with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The
country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal
business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals
are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter
(December 5, 2003).”
To fill this need former
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then health minister of Israel, organized a big
donor campaign in the summer of 1992, but while the number of donors
skyrocketed, need still greatly surpassed supply.
Palestinian disappearances
increase
Boström, who earlier wrote of
all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, (20) reports in his recent article:
“While the campaign was
running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the
West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back
dead, with their bodies ripped open.
“Talk of the bodies terrified
the population of the occupied territories. There were rumours of a dramatic
increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of
autopsied bodies.”
“I was in the area at the
time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff
concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ
theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything
about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled
around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank
and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of
organs before being killed.”
He describes the case of
19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his
village.
“The first shot hit him in
the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was
subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down
from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally,
they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of
the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a
jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military
helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his
family.”
Five days later he was
returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Boström reports
that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and
onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head.
Boström writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a
thing.
“The families in the West
Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons
are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told
me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes
from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at
night, dead and autopsied.”
Why autopsies?
Boström describes the
questions that families asked:
“Why are they keeping the
bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to
the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our
will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at
night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off
during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?”
Israel’s answer was that all
Palestinians who were killed were routinely autopsied. However, Boström
points out that of the133 Palestinians who were killed that year, only 69
were autopsied.
He goes on to write:
“We know that Israel has a
great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs
which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of
it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate,
as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young
Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at
night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been
cut from abdomen to chin.
It’s time to bring clarity to
this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken
place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.” (21)
The new “Blood Libel”?
In scanning through the
reaction to Boström’s report, one is struck by the multitude of charges that
his article is a new version of the old anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Given
that fact, it is interesting to examine a 2007 book by Israel’s pre-eminent
expert on medieval Jewish history, and what happened to him.
The author is Bar-Ilan
professor (and rabbi) Ariel Toaff, son of the former chief rabbi of Rome, a
religious leader so famous that an Israeli journalist writes that Toaff’s
father “is to Italian Jewry as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” Ariel Toaff,
himself, is considered “one of the greatest scholars in his field.” (22, 23)
In February 2007 the Israeli
and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the US media somehow missed it)
with news that Professor Toaff had written a book entitled "Pasque di
Sangue" (“Blood Passovers”) (24) containing evidence that there “was a
factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”
Based on 35 years of
research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many,
real incidents.
In an interview with an
Italian newspaper (the book was published in Italy), Toaff says:
“My research shows that in
the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical
prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who
belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during
the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases
led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.” (25)
(Incidentally, an earlier
book containing similar findings was published some years ago, also by an
Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, of whom Noam Chomsky once wrote, “Shahak
is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge.
His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.” ) (26)
Professor Toaff was
immediately attacked from all sides, including pressure orchestrated by
Anti-Defamation League chairman Abe Foxman, but Toaff stood by his 35 years
of research, announcing:
"I will not give up my
devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me…
One shouldn't be afraid to tell the truth."
Before long, however, under
relentless public and private pressure, Toaff had recanted, withdrawn his
book, and promised to give all profits that had already accrued (the book
had been flying off Italian bookshelves) to Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League.
A year later he published a “revised version.”
Donald Boström's experience
seems to be a repeat of what Professor Toaff endured: calumny, vituperation,
and defamation. Boström has received death threats as well, perhaps an
experience that Professor Toaff also shared.
If Israel is innocent of
organ plundering accusations, or if its culpability is considerably less
than Boström and others suggest, it should welcome honest investigations
that would clear it of wrongdoing. Instead, the government and its advocates
are working to suppress all debate and crush those whose questions and
conclusions they find threatening.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, rather than responding to calls for an investigation, is
demanding that the Swedish government abandon its commitment to a free press
and condemn the article. The Israeli press office, apparently in retaliation
and to prevent additional investigation, is refusing to give press
credentials to reporters from the offending newspaper.
Just as in the case of the
rampage against Jenin, the attack on the USS liberty, the massacre of Gaza,
the crushing of Rachel Corrie, the torture of American citizens, and a
multitude of other examples, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide
resources to interfere with the investigative process.
It is difficult to conclude
that it has nothing to hide.
Alison Weir is
executive director of If Americans
Knew. A version of this article containing citations and additional
information is available at
http://ifamericansknew/cur_sit/sweden.html
Notes:
1/ There are two English
translations; this article uses the first:
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
[ saved as Our sons plundered for their organs ]
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/SwedishTrans.html
The original Swedish article
in Aftonbladet can be viewed at
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
2/ New York Times, Feb. 3,
1969, p. 8, Column 6 (53 words)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046041.html
3/ 40 years after Israel's
first transplant, donor's family says his heart was stolen
By Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz
Correspondent, Dec. 14, 2008
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0490/9004021.htm
- Autopsies and Executions
4/ Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs, April 1990, Page 21, The Intifada: Autopsies and
Executions
http://www.jweekly.com/
-
http://www.jweekly.com/includes/print/9384/article/bizarre-death-of-scottish-tourist-involves-suicide-missing-heart/
5/ October 30, 1998, Bizarre
death of Scottish tourist involves suicide, missing heart
by NETTY C. GROSS, Jerusalem
Post Service
http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
- Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem
6/ The Forward, Illicit
Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem, By Rebecca Dube, Aug. 26, 2009
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg114437.html
7/ Masons, Muslims, Templars,
Jews, Henry and Dolly.
http://ccun.org/Opinion
8/ Al-Jazeerah:
Cross-Cultural Understanding, Khalid Amayreh, August 20, 2009
9/
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/12699
- saved as Family File Suit Against Dr. Yehuda Hiss - Soldiers Family File
Suit Against Dr. Yehuda Hiss
10/
http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
- Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem
11/ http://www.economist.com/
saved as The gap between supply and demand
12/ The Economist, Organ
transplants: The gap between supply and demand, Oct. 9, 2008 - Yours for $34
12/http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
saved as - Poor Sell Organs to
Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring
BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to
Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring
By Mario Osava, IPS, Feb. 23,
2004
13/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/935092.html
saved as Two Haifa men sentenced to jail for organ trafficking
Haaretz, Two Haifa men
sentenced to jail for organ trafficking, By Fadi Eyadat, Dec. 18, 2007
14/
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766040398&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
-
Police uncover illegal organ trade ring By REBECCA ANNA STOIL, July
23, 2007
15/
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/671687
saved as
Sting rocks
U.S. transplant industry, David Porter, Carla K. Johnson, ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 25, 2009
16/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102799.html
- saved as U.S. Professor - told FBI about kidney trafficking 7 years ago By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz
Correspondent, August, 3, 2009
17/
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3388529,00.html A mitzvah called organ
donation, Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg, 10.6.07
18/
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3265889,00.html
- saved as Orthodox in uproar over organ
donation incident, Neta Sela, 06.22.06
19/
http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Body_Snatchers.htm
- saved as
The Return of
the Body Snatchers, By Israel Shamir
20/
http://www.bokus.com/b/9789170370939.html
- saved as Inshallah - konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina
21/
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
22/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/829381.html
- saved as The wayward son Ha’aretz by Adi Schwartz, March 1, 2007
23/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
- saved as Bar-Ilan to order professor to explain research behind
Blood Libel book Ha'aretz By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz
Service and The Associated Press, Feb 11, 2007
24/
http://www.bloodpassover.com/toafftableofcontents.htm
- saved as
BLOOD PASSOVER
Israeli writer Israel Shamir
reports that some years ago “…a leading Chabad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburgh,
gave his religious permission for a Jew to take a liver from a non-Jew even
without his consent. He said that ‘a Jew is entitled to extract the liver
from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the
life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of
an animal.’
25/
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
- Haaretz, Bar Ilan to order
professor to explain research behind blood libel book, by Ofri Hani, Feb.
11, 2007.
26/
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/august-september01/0108011.html
- saved as Israel Shahak (1933-2001) RIP
Washington Report on Middle
East Affairs, August/September 2001, page 11, In Memoriam: Israel Shahak
(1933-2001), By Norton Mezvinsky
UNQUOTE
This obit tells us that his
brother joined the RAF and was shot down. The
Commonwealth War Graves Commission has no record of him or any other
Shahak for that matter. A book called
Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections is mentioned, it does exist.
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel is also out there. Obit by
Norton Mezvinsky His brother is a thieving Jew
Ed Mezvinsky so perhaps Norton is a lying Jew.
PS Sources are saved in D:\Data\Organjackers
Jews Trading Human Organs In Israel [
7 April 2010 ]
QUOTE
Police on Tuesday arrested six men suspected of being
involved in an organ trafficking ring in northern Israel. Among the suspects are
an IDF reserves brigadier-general and two lawyers.
The department for fraud and misappropriation in northern Israel has been
conducting an undercover investigation which began following a complaint by a
50-year-old woman from Nazareth, who replied to an advertisement in Arabic
offering 100,000 dollars for a kidney.
The woman underwent medical examinations to ensure a match, and she was then
flown a country in Eastern Europe where they extracted her kidney. The woman
said that when she returned to Israel, she did not receive the money promised to
her. Police say they have since received similar complaints. Police also said that during the investigation they
uncovered a large, very well-organized industry of organ trafficking. The ring
includes organ traffickers, agents, and lawyers.
UNQUOTE
They are
Jews. They are thieves. If they had not robbed the punters, if they had given
honest value they would have gotten away with it. Perhaps they will get away
with it. It's not what you know. It's who you know.
Errors & omissions, broken links,
cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if
you find any I am open to comment.
Email
me at Mike Emery. All
financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep
it private, use my
PGP Key.
Home
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Updated on
02/01/2024 14:19
QUOTE
Israeli Organ Harvesting
Just as in a multitude
of other cases, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide resources to
interfere with the investigative process, notes Alison Weir.
Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper
published an article containing shocking material: testimony and
circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting
internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years.
Worse yet, some of the
information reported in the article suggests that in some instances
Palestinians may have been captured with this macabre purpose in mind. In the article, “Our sons
plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Boström writes that
Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men
and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious
accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”
An army of Israeli officials
and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Boström and the
newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was
reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An
Israeli official called it “hate porn.” Commentary magazine wrote
that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European
funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.” Numerous people likened the article
to the medieval “Blood
Libel,” (widely refuted stories that Jews killed
people to use their blood in religious rituals). Even some pro-Palestinian
writers joined in the criticism, expressing scepticism.
The fact is, however, that
substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft,
and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given
such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might
otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up
significant information. Below are a few examples of
previous reports on this topic.
Israel’s first heart
transplant
Israel’s very first, historic
heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent
or consulting his family. In December 1968 a man named
Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) (2)
died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was
“doing well.” After initially refusing to
release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally
turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper
body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who
had suffered a stroke. When they removed the
bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages,
and the heart was missing.
During this time, the
headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial
shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and
demanded answers.
The hospital at first denied
that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but
the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet
ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document
promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been
used. The hospital explained that
it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without
the family's consent. (3) (The United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its
definition of human exploitation.)
Indications that the removal
of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed.
Director of forensic
medicine on missing organs
A 1990 article in the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled “Autopsies and Executions”
by Mary Barrett reports on the grotesque killings of young Palestinians. It
includes an interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazalch, the former chief health
official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of
forensic medicine and autopsies. Barrett asks him about “the
widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West
Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.” He responded:
"There are indications that
for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed
from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just
too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If
someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal
organs, what will people assume?” (4)
Mysterious Scottish death
In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair
Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at
Ben Gurion airport.
His family was informed of
the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three
weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair's corpse home.
[Alisdair’s brother] says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different
option: burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of
about $1,300.”
The family scraped up the
money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University
of Glasgow. It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were
missing. At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel. The J report states:
“A heart said to be
Sinclair's was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James
wanted the [Israeli] Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm
that this heart was indeed their brother's, but the Institute's director,
Professor Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by
some sources at $1,500.” Despite repeated requests
from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist's and police reports,
Israeli officials refused to release either. (5,6,7)
Israeli government
officials raise questions
Palestinian journalist Khalid
Amayreh reports in an article in CCUN:
“In January, 2002, an Israeli
cabinet minister tacitly admitted that organs taken from the bodies of
Palestinian victims might have been used for transplants in Jewish patients
without the knowledge of the Palestinian victims’ families.
“The minister, Nessim Dahan,
said in response to a question by an Arab Knesset member that he couldn’t
deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the
Israeli army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.
“‘I couldn’t say for sure
that something like that didn’t happen.’”
Amayreh writes that the
Knesset member who posed the question said that he “had received ‘credible
evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Kabir
extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies
of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and the
West Bank.” (8)
Israel’s chief pathologist
removed from post for stealing body parts
For a number of years there
were allegations that Israel’s leading pathologist was stealing body parts.
In 2001 the Israeli national news service reported:
“… the parents of soldier
Ze’ev Buzgallo who was killed in a Golan Heights military training accident,
are filing a petition with the High Court of Justice calling for the
immediate suspension of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and that criminal charges be filed
against him. Hiss serves as the director of the Abu Kabir Forensic
Institute….According to the parents, the body of their son was used for
medical experimentation without their consent, experiments authorized by
Hiss. (9) In 2002 the service reported:
“The revelation of illegally
stored body parts in the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute has prompted MK Anat
Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, to demand the immediate
suspension of the director, Prof. Yehuda Hiss."
Alisdair Sinclair’s death had
first alerted authorities to Hiss’s malfeasance in 1998, though nothing was
done for years. The Forward reported:
“In 2001, an Israeli Health
Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking
body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission
during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research
and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never
charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running
the state morgue, following years of complaints.” (10)
Harvesting kidneys from
impoverished communities
According to the Economist, a
kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. “Donors were
recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to
visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each
paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday”; they pretended they were
relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.” (11)
In 2004 a legislative
commission in Brazil reported, “At least 30 Brazilians have sold their
kidneys to an international human organ trafficking ring for transplants
performed in South Africa, with Israel providing most of the funding.” According to an IPS report:
“The recipients were mostly Israelis, who receive health insurance
reimbursements of 70,000 to 80,000 dollars for life-saving medical
procedures performed abroad.”
IPS reports:
The Brazilians were recruited
in Brazil’s most impoverished neighbourhoods and were paid $10,000 per
kidney, “but as ‘supply’ increased, the payments fell as low as 3,000
dollars.” The trafficking had been organized by a retired Israeli police
officer, who said “he did not think he was committing a crime, given that
the transaction is considered legal by his country's government.”
The Israeli embassy issued a
statement denying any participation by the Israeli government in the illegal
trade of human organs but said it did recognize that its citizens, in
emergency cases, could undergo organ transplants in other countries, "in a
legal manner, complying with international norms," and with the financial
support of their medical insurance.
However, IPS reports that the
commission chair termed the Israeli stance “at the very least
‘anti-ethical’, adding that trafficking can only take place on a major scale
if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system.”
He went on to state that the resources provided by the Israeli health system
"were a determining factor" that allowed the network to function. (12)
Tel Aviv hospital head
promotes organ trafficking
IPS goes on to report:
“Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who
heads the Organs Watch project at the US University of California, Berkeley,
testified to the Pernambuco legislative commission that international
trafficking of human organs began some 12 years ago, promoted by Zacki
Shapira, former director of a hospital in Tel Aviv.
“Shapira performed more than
300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other
countries, such as Turkey. The recipients are very wealthy or have very good
health insurance, and the ‘donors’ are very poor people from Eastern Europe,
Philippines and other developing countries, said Scheper-Hughes, who
specialises in medical anthropology.”
Israel prosecutes organ
traffickers
In 2007 Israel’s Ha’aretz
newspaper reported that two men confessed to persuading “Arabs from the
Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally
ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” They then would refuse
to pay them.
The paper reported that the
two were part of a criminal ring that included an Israeli surgeon. According
to the indictment, the surgeon sold the kidneys he harvested for between
$125,000 and $135,000. (13)
Earlier that year another
Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, reported that ten members of an
Israeli organ smuggling ring targeting Ukrainians had been arrested. (14)
In still another 2007 story,
the Jerusalem Post reported that “Professor Zaki Shapira, one of Israel's
leading transplant surgeons, was arrested in Turkey on Thursday on suspicion
of involvement in an organ trafficking ring. According to the report, the
transplants were arranged in Turkey and took place at private hospitals in
Istanbul.”
Israeli organ trafficking
comes to the US?
In July of this year even US
media reported on the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn,
recently arrested by federal officials in a massive corruption sweep in New
Jersey that netted mayors, government officials and a number of prominent
rabbis. Boström opens his article with this incident.
According to the federal
complaint, Rosenbaum, who has close ties to Israel, said that he had been
involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years. A US Attorney
explained: "His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney
for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000." (15)
This is reportedly the first
case of international organ trafficking in the US
University of California
anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who informed the
FBI about Rosenbaum seven years ago, says she heard reports that he had held
donors at gunpoint to ensure they followed through on agreements to “donate”
their organs. (16)
Israel’s organ donor
problems
Israel has an extraordinarily
small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service
Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the
ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have
organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population
holds such cards. (17)
“According to statistics from
the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a
transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis
were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but
only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”
According to Ynet, the low
incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an
uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law
performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a
similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed
silently.” (18, 19)
The Swedish article reports
that ‘Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of
dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that
ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the 1990s. Jerusalem Post wrote
that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s
example shortly.”
“Half of the kidneys
transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought
illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health
authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it.
At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country
with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The
country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal
business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals
are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter
(December 5, 2003).”
To fill this need former
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then health minister of Israel, organized a big
donor campaign in the summer of 1992, but while the number of donors
skyrocketed, need still greatly surpassed supply.
Palestinian disappearances
increase
Boström, who earlier wrote of
all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, (20) reports in his recent article:
“While the campaign was
running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the
West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back
dead, with their bodies ripped open.
“Talk of the bodies terrified
the population of the occupied territories. There were rumours of a dramatic
increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of
autopsied bodies.”
“I was in the area at the
time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff
concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ
theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything
about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled
around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank
and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of
organs before being killed.”
He describes the case of
19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his
village.
“The first shot hit him in
the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was
subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down
from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally,
they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of
the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a
jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military
helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his
family.”
Five days later he was
returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Boström reports
that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and
onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head.
Boström writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a
thing.
“The families in the West
Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons
are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told
me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes
from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at
night, dead and autopsied.”
Why autopsies?
Boström describes the
questions that families asked:
“Why are they keeping the
bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to
the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our
will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at
night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off
during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?”
Israel’s answer was that all
Palestinians who were killed were routinely autopsied. However, Boström
points out that of the133 Palestinians who were killed that year, only 69
were autopsied.
He goes on to write:
“We know that Israel has a
great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs
which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of
it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate,
as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young
Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at
night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been
cut from abdomen to chin.
It’s time to bring clarity to
this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken
place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.” (21)
The new “Blood Libel”?
In scanning through the
reaction to Boström’s report, one is struck by the multitude of charges that
his article is a new version of the old anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Given
that fact, it is interesting to examine a 2007 book by Israel’s pre-eminent
expert on medieval Jewish history, and what happened to him.
The author is Bar-Ilan
professor (and rabbi) Ariel Toaff, son of the former chief rabbi of Rome, a
religious leader so famous that an Israeli journalist writes that Toaff’s
father “is to Italian Jewry as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” Ariel Toaff,
himself, is considered “one of the greatest scholars in his field.” (22, 23)
In February 2007 the Israeli
and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the US media somehow missed it)
with news that Professor Toaff had written a book entitled "Pasque di
Sangue" (“Blood Passovers”) (24) containing evidence that there “was a
factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”
Based on 35 years of
research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many,
real incidents.
In an interview with an
Italian newspaper (the book was published in Italy), Toaff says:
“My research shows that in
the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical
prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who
belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during
the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases
led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.” (25)
(Incidentally, an earlier
book containing similar findings was published some years ago, also by an
Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, of whom Noam Chomsky once wrote, “Shahak
is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge.
His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.” ) (26)
Professor Toaff was
immediately attacked from all sides, including pressure orchestrated by
Anti-Defamation League chairman Abe Foxman, but Toaff stood by his 35 years
of research, announcing:
"I will not give up my
devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me…
One shouldn't be afraid to tell the truth."
Before long, however, under
relentless public and private pressure, Toaff had recanted, withdrawn his
book, and promised to give all profits that had already accrued (the book
had been flying off Italian bookshelves) to Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League.
A year later he published a “revised version.”
Donald Boström's experience
seems to be a repeat of what Professor Toaff endured: calumny, vituperation,
and defamation. Boström has received death threats as well, perhaps an
experience that Professor Toaff also shared.
If Israel is innocent of
organ plundering accusations, or if its culpability is considerably less
than Boström and others suggest, it should welcome honest investigations
that would clear it of wrongdoing. Instead, the government and its advocates
are working to suppress all debate and crush those whose questions and
conclusions they find threatening.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, rather than responding to calls for an investigation, is
demanding that the Swedish government abandon its commitment to a free press
and condemn the article. The Israeli press office, apparently in retaliation
and to prevent additional investigation, is refusing to give press
credentials to reporters from the offending newspaper.
Just as in the case of the
rampage against Jenin, the attack on the USS liberty, the massacre of Gaza,
the crushing of Rachel Corrie, the torture of American citizens, and a
multitude of other examples, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide
resources to interfere with the investigative process.
It is difficult to conclude
that it has nothing to hide.
Alison Weir is
executive director of If Americans
Knew. A version of this article containing citations and additional
information is available at
http://ifamericansknew/cur_sit/sweden.html
Notes:
1/ There are two English
translations; this article uses the first:
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
[ saved as Our sons plundered for their organs ]
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/SwedishTrans.html
The original Swedish article
in Aftonbladet can be viewed at
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
2/ New York Times, Feb. 3,
1969, p. 8, Column 6 (53 words)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046041.html
3/ 40 years after Israel's
first transplant, donor's family says his heart was stolen
By Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz
Correspondent, Dec. 14, 2008
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0490/9004021.htm
- Autopsies and Executions
4/ Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs, April 1990, Page 21, The Intifada: Autopsies and
Executions
http://www.jweekly.com/
-
http://www.jweekly.com/includes/print/9384/article/bizarre-death-of-scottish-tourist-involves-suicide-missing-heart/
5/ October 30, 1998, Bizarre
death of Scottish tourist involves suicide, missing heart
by NETTY C. GROSS, Jerusalem
Post Service
http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
- Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem
6/ The Forward, Illicit
Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem, By Rebecca Dube, Aug. 26, 2009
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg114437.html
7/ Masons, Muslims, Templars,
Jews, Henry and Dolly.
http://ccun.org/Opinion
8/ Al-Jazeerah:
Cross-Cultural Understanding, Khalid Amayreh, August 20, 2009
9/
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/12699
- saved as Family File Suit Against Dr. Yehuda Hiss - Soldiers Family File
Suit Against Dr. Yehuda Hiss
10/
http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
- Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem
11/ http://www.economist.com/
saved as The gap between supply and demand
12/ The Economist, Organ
transplants: The gap between supply and demand, Oct. 9, 2008 - Yours for $34
12/http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
saved as - Poor Sell Organs to
Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring
BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to
Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring
By Mario Osava, IPS, Feb. 23,
2004
13/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/935092.html
saved as Two Haifa men sentenced to jail for organ trafficking
Haaretz, Two Haifa men
sentenced to jail for organ trafficking, By Fadi Eyadat, Dec. 18, 2007
14/
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766040398&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
-
Police uncover illegal organ trade ring By REBECCA ANNA STOIL, July
23, 2007
15/
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/671687
saved as
Sting rocks
U.S. transplant industry, David Porter, Carla K. Johnson, ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 25, 2009
16/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102799.html
- saved as U.S. Professor - told FBI about kidney trafficking 7 years ago By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz
Correspondent, August, 3, 2009
17/
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3388529,00.html A mitzvah called organ
donation, Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg, 10.6.07
18/
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3265889,00.html
- saved as Orthodox in uproar over organ
donation incident, Neta Sela, 06.22.06
19/
http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Body_Snatchers.htm
- saved as
The Return of
the Body Snatchers, By Israel Shamir
20/
http://www.bokus.com/b/9789170370939.html
- saved as Inshallah - konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina
21/
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
22/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/829381.html
- saved as The wayward son Ha’aretz by Adi Schwartz, March 1, 2007
23/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
- saved as Bar-Ilan to order professor to explain research behind
Blood Libel book Ha'aretz By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz
Service and The Associated Press, Feb 11, 2007
24/
http://www.bloodpassover.com/toafftableofcontents.htm
- saved as
BLOOD PASSOVER
Israeli writer Israel Shamir
reports that some years ago “…a leading Chabad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburgh,
gave his religious permission for a Jew to take a liver from a non-Jew even
without his consent. He said that ‘a Jew is entitled to extract the liver
from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the
life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of
an animal.’
25/
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
- Haaretz, Bar Ilan to order
professor to explain research behind blood libel book, by Ofri Hani, Feb.
11, 2007.
26/
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/august-september01/0108011.html
- saved as Israel Shahak (1933-2001) RIP
Washington Report on Middle
East Affairs, August/September 2001, page 11, In Memoriam: Israel Shahak
(1933-2001), By Norton Mezvinsky
UNQUOTE
This obit tells us that his
brother joined the RAF and was shot down. The
Commonwealth War Graves Commission has no record of him or any other
Shahak for that matter. A book called
Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections is mentioned, it does exist.
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel is also out there. Obit by
Norton Mezvinsky His brother is a thieving Jew
Ed Mezvinsky so perhaps Norton is a lying Jew.
PS Sources are saved in D:\Data\Organjackers