If it is known that this article is a fake, the thread should be trashed.
If you guys want to talk about organ harvesting in general, make a different threat without a title from an article based on anti-Semitic propaganda. (because that is what it is, not because criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic)
Or we can keep this on and make a couple posts with head lines of Gypsies Kidnap Children, and Reds Murder Innocents, with a link to some 1900s articles.

Also, don't criticize the guy for posting a bad article.
He said
at the start, and the article was in a legitimate newspaper. If this were true, it would be a big story.

It's very common for people to accuse their oppressors of organ stealing and the like. Under the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, blood from local blood banks used to be sold in the United States. The people refereed to the blood banks as the House of Dracula. Conservatives in the U.S. claim that people executed by China are used for organ harvesting. It's a variation on the "our enemies are cannibals" theme, and as another poster noted, the blood libel as well.

i could see Israel doing this is if they was poor and needed money to buy weapons, but Israel is rich and gets all its weapons directly from the U.S., the only reason i could think this would be done is too provide organs for rich Israelies who need transplants, but you cant just go out and get a liver from some random guy and stick it someone else it requires alot of tests first so basicily you would have to kidnaps dozens if not hundreds of palestians before you found a match which would be make much bigger head lines

Thats exactly what it sounds like. Don't they generally remove organs during autopsy for biopsies and stuff, then cremate them?

I'm extremely suspicious of this. It sounds very much like the blood libel myths, and I think it is unwise to spread this sort of thing around before it has been confirmed. Plus - and maybe I am teetering on the brink of conspiratorial logic here - it seems like the sort of tripe that the Zionists love (which I almost suspect is why Ha'aretz picked it up) because they can point to it and say, "see, look at the rabid anti-Semitism being spread all over the world about Israel; we need to "defend" ourselves".
I'm not saying that it is impossible that its true, but I very much doubt it is. Ignoring the parallels to blood libel completely, the idea that the IDF would snatch up Palestinians for the sake of harvesting their organs and then send the corpses back to the families just seems ludicrous. I'm not putting the brutality of the alleged crimes past the IDF, but why would they send the corpses, with missing organs, back to the families? Why not just dispose of them and destroy the evidence? Makes no sense.

After further research, it seems that other than 2 articles there is no evidence to support this. It's possible, but now I'm beginning to question the reliability of my own post.

Admins: do what you like with this.

I would not be surprised, kind of goes in line with what the IDF has been doing to the civillian populations of Southern Lebanon and Gaza with thier airplanes.

All of this is top-news in Sweden right now.

It looks like it has developed into a diplomatic crisis between Sweden and Israel.

Why, thank you, old chap — jolly good show and all that!

As I, and others, have said elsewhere, “political islam” is a thoroughly reactionary ideology. Do you also support “political catholicism”? Oh yes, that’s right, in Poland you supported Solidarność, the only trade union beloved of the Vatican and Western imperialism.

How many times must I say that I will have no truck with a movement that says “you can march ... at the back of the procession ... behind the beardies ... and dressed in a black tent with an eyeslit”?

I have said several times that I would defend the Palestinians militarily — I will fight the “politics” of their clerical-nationalist (mis)leaders as long as I have breath.

yes...
and it's not new news in the arab 3rd world either....

PFLP demands investigation into allegations of organ theft by occupation soldiers



The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called on Saturday, August 22, 2009 for an immediate, serious investigation into reports alleging that Zionist occupation forces stole organs from young Palestinians they killed in the West Bank and Gaza.

These reports, published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, quoted Palestinians who recalled young men who had been seized by Zionist forces and killed in custody, and their bodies being returned missing organs, as well as that the bodies of young Palestinians killed in clashes were taken by the occupation forces and buried without being returned to their families.

The PFLP said in its statement that these reports should be taken seriously by international human rights organizations, and fully investigated. Crimes and abuses by the occupation forces have been repeatedly reported and yet the occupation army has been able to commit crime after crime without punishment or accountability, despite vast amounts of evidence of occupation crimes. In addition, the statement noted that similar issues have been raised time and time again since the 1980s, and that there have been repeated reports of organ theft and improper experimentation on Palestinians killed by the occupation forces. In Gaza in the 1980s, soldiers were said to have stolen organs from children taken to Israeli hospitals, where they died.

In addition, numerous Israelis have been indicated in Europe and the United States to be involved in international organ-trading networks, including sales of human organs and money laundering.

The Front commended Donald Bostrom, the reporter from Aftonbladet, and all efforts being made by individuals and institutions around the world in order to bring the occupation forces to justice for their crimes against our people, as well as in the struggle to build global solidarity in order to force the occupier to stop its crimes and racist practices and recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people.

The party praised the work of correspondent Donald Boström and all those who facilitated his reporting. The PFLP reiterated its call for the need to bring Israeli soldiers to justice for their actions.


http://www.pflp.ps/english/?q=pflp-d...ns-organ-theft

I would like to know if there is any evidence for the claims made, though. If the only thing out there is a bunch of unsubstantiated claims without any documentation or hard evidence to back them up, it is still just hearsay.
And if, in the end, it turns out to indeed be just another blood libel myth, the left is going to lose a whole fucking lot of credibility.

In a sense, this is irrelevant — he left has never had and never will have any credibility among rusted-on capitalists, or in the capitalist media.

But you’re right — the masses of people (whether they be nominally christians, jews, muslims, or galaxian orthodox, or whether they hold no religious affiliation at all) will judge our credibility by the way we treat these accusations. If we gullibly accept and echo such back-alley gossip, they will revile us as stooges to reactionary clerical mediaevalists — if we stand up and loudly say that this slander is BULLSHIT, more appropriate for a Dark-Age vellum manuscript that for a “liberal” paper in an advanced social democracy, while at the same time committing ourselves to the physical defence of the Palestinian people, we will gain their respect.

Honest leftists will attempt to unite the proletariat of all nations around their class interests (C’mon people, this is Marxism 101 — remember “Workers of All Nations, Unite”?). This attempt to weld the muslim masses to their own kings, sheikhs and mullahs is a contemptible bourgeois-nationalist ploy and will result in betrayal of the proletariat of the Middle East.

It was not a claim by the newspaper, technically speaking.

It was rather a vague suggestion by a reporter who have lived amongst Palestinian families. In Sweden, a disproportional huge part of the public debate is honoured to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where the right predictably supports Israel and the left equally predictably supports the Palestinians.

Now, hilarity has ensued as Israel's crazy right-wing government has attacked the moderate right-wing government of Sweden over that the Swedish government could not stand by the excuse(!) for the newspaper article offered by Sweden's ambassador in Israel.

In Sweden, the political right - now championed by the blogger Dick Erixon - now demands that the government offer an apology to Israel, while the left demands that freedom of expression is kept. Therefore, the left - according to the right - are antisemites. Three years ago, with the Muhammed cartoon crisis, the roles were reversed.

Lars Vilks put it best when he said that it was not really about freedom of expression, but rather positioning between the right and the left.

Perhaps I should have been clearer, but when I said "credibility", I certainly did not mean "credibility among capitalists", as such a thing is obviously a contradiction in terms with regard to the revolutionary left.

Sweden is a society with a weak identity and swedish people who have political views usually don't know why they have them. The nation is spoiled with peace and prosperity for 200 years and politics become more of a fashion thing and a way of finding a group identity. Sweden is detached from reality and lack serious internal challenges, this is also why foreign politics takes such an extreme twist. A rather insignificant country with 9 million citizens, geographically located at the edge of the civilized world and physically cut off from the rest of Europe. Foreign politics and interfering with the domestic politics of other nations is a way for Sweden to fill the void of not having enough to deal with at home.

The detachment from a broader reality provides no challenge to help swedish individuals develop true ideological needs. So instead they identify with whoever at the time seems most likely to help sustain their glass bubble where no real conflict can exist. Sweden wants to avoid real conflict in the real world at all costs, but needs to keep the artificial excuse for ideological substance and identity and does so by lecturing other nations (most of them, aside from Israel much more prominent in real world politics than Sweden will ever be) such as Italy, the US, Israel and China.

Nothing which comes out of a swedish newspaper or from a swedish politician should be taken too seriously. It is after all a nation of spoiled people out of touch with reality.

PFLP calls on Italian and Swedish supporters of Palestine to reject Zionist attempts at intimidation


The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called upon friends and supporters of Palestine in Italy, Sweden, and throughout Europe and the world to reject Zionist attempts to trample freedom of speech and the press and suppress the movement in support of Palestine. Responding to the statements of Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, a PFLP spokesperson said that it is urgent that European countries and people internationally isolate Israel and fully investigate its abuses.

The PFLP spokesperson harshly condemned the intervention of Frattini, who said that "there are limits to freedom of the press" and has pressed for expanded and increased economic and political relations between Israel and Europe. Israel has attempted to demand that the government of Sweden condemn an article by Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom published in the newspaper Aftonbladet that discusses Palestinians' reports of organ theft from the bodies of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation forces.

Rather than refute the truth of Bostrom's article, the PFLP spokesperson said, the Zionist regime has attempted to muddy the waters and create a chilling precedent that could silence journalists and activists for Palestinian human rights in Sweden and throughout Europe. The PFLP spokesperson said further that it is utterly inappropriate for a government to "condemn" an article published in a free press, and demanded that the Zionist movement cease its seemingly endless attempts to silence exposure of its repeated violation of Palestinian human and national rights.

Furthermore the PFLP spokesperson called upon supporters of Palestine in Italy and throughout Europe to demand Frattini's resignation, saying that Israel and all of its products, academic and cultural institutions and corporations should be boycotted and internationally isolated, and the Zionist state subject to sanctions, rather than increasing relations with Israel while it continues its numerous and brutal violations of Palestinian human rights.

The PFLP spokesperson said that the Zionist occupation state is illegitimate and built entirely as a racist project upon the dispossession of Palestinians and the theft of Palestinian land, and that it currently continues its military occupation, mass imprisonment of Palestinians, construction of settlements on stolen land, Zionization of Jerusalem, systematic repression of Palestinians in occupied Palestine 1948, denial of over 7 million Palestinian refugees' right to return, the siege and ongoing aggression against our people in Gaza, as well as coming only months after the devastating massacres committed against Palestinians in Gaza that raised shock and horror around the world at the occupation state.

Furthermore, the PFLP spokesperson said, any attempt to divert attention from Israeli crimes or label investigation of them as "anti-Semitism" is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the real issue - the crimes of the occupation state, for which it must be held accountable. The PFLP spokesperson said that the European Union should be taking up the question of sanctions and isolation of Israel, not addressing the concerns of the occupier.

The PFLP spokesperson went on to say that Frattini's demand that Sweden "prove its stance against anti-Semitism" is absurd and once again, is working in concert with the occupying force to divert attention from the racist crimes of Zionism being committed daily. Opposition to the racist criminal state of Israel, the spokesperson said, has nothing to do with Jews, Judaism, or bias or hatred against them; on the contrary, the spokesperson said, it is Israel itself that is the racist state, based on Zionism, a racist ideology that supports the theft of Palestinian and Arab land and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Arabs in order to create a so-called "Jewish state" on Palestinian Arab land!

The PFLP spokesperson emphasized that the Front is calling upon all friends of Palestine in Italy, Sweden and throughout Europe to reject Zionist demands to silence journalists and avoid investigation of Israeli crimes and to reject utterly all politicians who attempt to justify these crimes. Furthermore, it called upon the European Union to instead apply full boycott and sanctions to Israel and its products and institutions because of its racist nature and its violations of Palestinian human and national rights.

The PFLP spokesperson concluded by expressing its solidarity with the Swedish journalist, Donald Bostrom, the newspaper Aftonbladet, and all forces and institutions in the world pressing for full investigation, exposure and prosecution for the war crimes of the Zionist state.

http://www.pflp.ps/english/?q=node/1735

In fact, I do believe that it's confirmed that South African police stole organs from the bodies of slain black men during the height of apartheid.

The black market organ industry is a real thing, and the organs have to be coming from somewhere.

Accountability and the organ theft controversy
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 5 September 2009

The hyperventilating by Israel's leaders over a story published in a Swedish newspaper last month suggesting that the Israeli army assisted in organ theft from Palestinians has distracted attention from the disturbing allegations made by Palestinian families that were the basis of the article's central claim.

The families' fears that relatives, killed by the Israeli army, had body parts removed during unauthorized autopsies performed in Israel have been overshadowed by accusations of a "blood libel" directed against the reporter, Donald Bostrom, and the Aftonbladet newspaper, as well as the Swedish government and people.



http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10753.shtml

I have no idea whether the story is true. Like most journalists working in Israel and Palestine, I have heard such rumors before. Until Bostrom wrote his piece, no Western journalist, as far as I know, had investigated them. After so many years, the assumption by journalists was that there was little hope of finding evidence -- apart from literally by digging up the corpses. Doubtless, the inevitable charge of anti-semitism such reports attract acted as a powerful deterrent too.

What is striking about this episode is that the families making the claims were not given a hearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the first intifada, when most of the reports occurred, and are still being denied the right to voice their concerns today.

Israel's sensitivity to the allegation of organ theft -- or "harvesting," as many observers coyly refer to the practice -- appears to trump the genuine concerns of the families about possible abuse of their loved ones.

Bostrom has been much criticized for the flimsy evidence he produced in support of his inflammatory story. Certainly there is much to criticize in his and the newspaper's presentation of the report.

Most significantly, Bostrom and Aftonbladet exposed themselves to the charge of anti-semitism -- at least from Israeli officials keen to make mischief -- through a major error of judgment.

They muddied the waters by trying to make a tenuous connection between the Palestinian families' allegations about organ theft during unauthorized autopsies and the entirely separate revelations this month that a group of US Jews had been arrested for money-laundering and trading in body parts.

In making that connection, Bostrom and Aftonbladet suggested that the problem of organ theft is a current one when they have produced only examples of such concern from the early 1990s. They also implied, whether intentionally or not, that abuses allegedly committed by the Israeli army could somehow be extrapolated more generally to Jews.

The Swedish reporter should instead have concentrated on the valid question raised by the families about why the Israeli army, by its own admission, took away the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed by its soldiers, allowed autopsies to be performed on them without the families' permission and then returned the bodies for burial in ceremonies held under tight security.

Bostrom's article highlighted the case of one Palestinian, 19-year-old Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, from the village of Imatin in the northern West Bank, who was killed in 1992. A shocking picture of Bilal's stitched-up body accompanied the report.

Bostrom has told the Israeli media that he knows of at least 20 cases of families claiming that the bodies of loved ones were returned with body parts missing, although he did not say whether any of these alleged incidents occurred more recently.

In 1992, the year in question, Bostrom says, the Israeli army admitted to him that it took away for autopsy 69 of the 133 Palestinians who died of unnatural causes. The army has not denied this part of his report.

A justifiable question from the families relayed by Bostrom is: why did the army want the autopsies carried out? Unless it can be shown that the army intended to conduct investigations into the deaths -- and there is apparently no suggestion that it did -- the autopsies were unnecessary.

In fact, they were more than unnecessary. They were counterproductive if we assume that the army has no interest in gathering evidence that could be used in future war crimes prosecutions of its soldiers. Israel has a long track record of stymying investigations into Palestinian deaths at the hands of its soldiers, and carried on that ignoble tradition in the wake of its recent assault on Gaza.

Of even greater concern for the Palestinian families is the fact that at around the time the bodies of their loved ones were whisked off by the army for autopsy, the only institute in Israel that conducts such autopsies, Abu Kabir, near Tel Aviv, was almost certainly at the centre of a trade in organs that later became a scandal inside Israel.

Equally disturbing, the doctor behind the plunder of body parts, Prof. Yehuda Hiss, appointed director of the Abu Kabir institute in the late 1980s, has never been jailed despite admitting to the organ theft and he continues to be the state's chief pathologist at the institute.

Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families' claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.

Allegations of Hiss' illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had "price listings" for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools.

Apparently undeterred by these revelations, Hiss still had an array of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time: "Over the past years, heads of the institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a 'storehouse' of organs at Abu Kabir."

Hiss did not deny the plunder of organs, admitting that the body parts belonged to soldiers killed in action and had been passed to medical institutes and hospitals in the interests of advancing research. Understandably, however, the Palestinian families are unlikely to be satisfied with Hiss' explanation. If the wishes of a soldier's family were disregarded by Hiss, why not Palestinian families' wishes too?

Hiss was allowed to continue as director of Abu Kabir until 2005 when allegations of a trade in organs surfaced again. On this occasion Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges and Hiss was given only a reprimand. He has continued as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir.

It should also be noted, as Bostrom points out, that in the early 1990s Israel was suffering from an acute shortage of organ donors to the extent that Ehud Olmert, health minister at the time, launched a public campaign to encourage Israelis to come forward.

This offers a possible explanation for Hiss' actions. He may have acted to help make up the shortfall.

Given the facts that are known, there must be at least a very strong suspicion that Hiss removed organs without authorization from some Palestinians he autopsied. Both this issue, and the army's possible role in supplying him with corpses, needs investigation.

Hiss is also implicated in another long-running and unresolved scandal from Israel's early years, in the 1950s, when the children of recent Jewish immigrants to Israel from Yemen were adopted by Ashkenazi couples after the Yeminite parents had been told that their child had died, usually after admission to hospital.

After an initial cover-up, the Yeminite parents have continued pressing for answers from the state, and forced officials to reopen the files. The Palestinian families deserve no less.

However, unlike the Yemenite parents, their chances of receiving any kind of investigation, transparent or otherwise, look all but hopeless.

When Palestinian demands for justice are not backed by investigations from journalists or the protests of the international community, Israel can safely ignore them.

It is worth remembering in this context the constant refrain from Israel's peace camp that the brutal, four-decade occupation of the Palestinians has profoundly corrupted Israeli society.

When the army enjoys power without accountability, how do Palestinians, or we, know what soldiers are allowed to get away with under cover of occupation? What restraints are in place to prevent abuses? And who takes them to task if they do commit crimes?

Similarly, when Israeli politicians are able to cry "blood libel" or "anti-semitism" when they are criticized, damaging the reputations of those they accuse, what incentive do they have to initiate inquiries that may harm them or the institutions they oversee? What reason do they have to be honest when they can bludgeon a critic into silence, at no cost to themselves?

This is the meaning of the phrase "power corrupts," and Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as at least one pathologist, demonstrably have far too much power -- most especially over Palestinians under occupation.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

You know this reminds me of nothing more than the White poster dating from the Russian Civil War portraying Trotsky as a stereotypical “big-nosed jew with heavy eyelids” sitting on a pile of skulls, or Hitler’s insistence that the fact that jewish newspapers abrogated “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” meant that they must be true.

It is interesting that, since the original story seems to have fallen flat, the reporter has shifted ground. The original Aftonbladet accusation was that the IDF was kidnapping young Palestinian men, killing them and stealing their organs for the illegal transplant trade. Evidence for this was obviously rather thin on the ground, so the author changed tack and decided to focus instead on organs harvested from already dead bodies after they had already reached the morgue. He dug around and found an example of an actual criminal — Dr Yehuda Hiss, head of Israel’s L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine — and attempted to link his case to the original report. OK, let’s get that out of the way first.

There was a long history of allegations, substantiated by the Israeli government, of Hiss and his lab taking organs from dead bodies without permission and using them for research or selling them to medical schools. 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. An Israeli Health Ministry investigation (in 2001) found no evidence that Hiss targeted Palestinians — rather, he seemed to view every body that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game for organ harvesting. The families of dead Israeli soldiers were among those who complained about Hiss’s conduct.

The Aftonbladet story was prompted by the arrest of suspected black-market kidney broker Levy Izhak Rosenbaum in New Jersey in July. Journalist Donald Boström claims to have learned of organ-harvesting in Israel in 1992, during the period in which Hiss served as chief pathologist. According to the criminal complaint against Rosenbaum, the accused organ broker told an undercover FBI agent that he’d been dealing in kidney transplants since about 1999. But timeline aside, the alleged link doesn’t make practical sense. First of all, by the time dead bodies get to the morgue, it’s much too late to transplant their organs into other people. Second, Rosenbaum is alleged to have arranged, for a fee, kidney transplants from live “donors” who travelled to the US from Israel for the operations — there’s no evidence that he ever dealt with organs removed post mortem.

So what we actually have is shocking enough — a story of the trade in organs taken from dead bodies without the consent of patients or their families. What we do not have is the original Aftonbladet story — which only exists in the perfervid imaginations of petty-bourgeois “leftists,” for whom the Palestinians all wear White Hats, in contrast to the Black-Hatted EEEEEEEVIL Israelis.

Let me say once again that Israel is a mini-imperialist state, which has committed criminal acts against the Palestinian people, attempting to destroy them both by slow strangulation and by quick murder. It can and should be attacked for its policies and its actions, its arrogant settler superiority and racism, but not by endorsing frankly ghoulish medieval fantasies which reveal more about the psychopathology of their originators and transmitters than they do about their subjects.

It may be all very well for bourgeois liberal journalists like Jonathon Cook to wax eloquent about “national liberation” and get carried away with the romanticism of “doe-eyed maidens in the souk (market), veiled from head to foot.” It is positively infantile for so-called “socialists” to tail after every “liberation” movement just because that movement claims to be “anti-imperialist” and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” — it becomes suicidal when the “movement” they are courting is composed of clerical-reactionaries who think that society should be run in accordance with the rather idiosyncratic and primitivist “eternally valid ‘Laws’” promulgated by their invisible friend rather than any ideas of freedom, justice, equality or the historic interests of the proletariat.

What’s next? The Afghan mujahadin (and their successors, the Taliban) and the Polish “union” Solidarność as “revolutionary” organizations? Oh wait, some of you already hold that position!

PS: It’s funny — if this story didn’t involve “Evil Overlords” and “Martyrs of the Oppressed” we could easily torpedo it by referring the gullible to http://www.snopes.com/horrors/robbery/kidney.asp , of which it is an obvious variant.