BEYOND DISGUST #25 ~ ISRAEL IS BACK TO THE ORGAN STEALING

http://snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/

Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent

Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.

The admission, by the former head of the country's forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called "antisemitic".

The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran's state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.

The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer."

Hiss said: "We started to harvest corneas ... whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.

She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

Israel demanded that Sweden condemn the Aftonbladet article, calling it an antisemitic "blood libel". Stockholm refused, saying that to so would violate freedom of speech in the country. The foreign minister then cancelled a visit to Israel, just as Sweden was taking over the EU's rotating presidency.

Hiss was removed from his post in 2004, when some details about organ harvesting were first reported, but he still works at the forensic institute.

Israel's health ministry said all harvesting was now done with permission. "The guidelines at that time were not clear," it said in a statement to Channel 2. "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

• This article was amended on 21 December 2009. The headline was changed as it did not reflect accurately the contents of the story. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's name was misspelled as Nancy Sheppard-Hughes in the original text.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs

Updates on Israeli Organ Harvesting

Quite a bit has happened since I wrote my articles.

It turns out that Israel's chief pathologist and one of its highest paid public officials, at least, had admitted on tape in 2000 that he had taken numerous body parts from Palestinians (as well as from Israelis). I posted several stories about this on our news blog. I'll write more about this later, especially since the Israeli propaganda apparatus in the U.S. and in Israel is attempting to bury this/spin it away.

Also, additional stories have been published on the issue. I'll start posting some of them here:

New York police arrest Jewish gang trafficking organs of Algerian children

Watan, September, 2009

An Algerian official revealed Sunday the New York city police were able to catch a Jewish gang involved in the abduction of children from Algeria and trafficking of their organs headed by Levy Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum was directly involved in the recent case of trading human organs which raised a storm of reactions in the US and Israel.

Dr. Mustafa Khayatti, the head of the Algerian national committee for the development of health and research, said that the arrest of the gang came after Interpol investigations showed that Algerian children were abducted from cities in western Algeria and taken to Morocco in order to harvest their kidneys and traffic them in Israel and the US for $20,000 and $100,000 dollars each.

“The arrest of Jewish organ trafficking gangs does not mean that the danger has gone, top officials and specialists in this issue assert that there are other Jewish gangs who remain active in several Arab countries,” Dr. Khayatti noted.

US authorities had arrested 44 people including Rabbis and mayors in New Jersey last July; they all were prosecuted for money laundering activities and sale of human organs.

Last month, a report issued by Aftonbladet, a newspaper Swedish, accused Israeli soldiers of kidnapping Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to kill them and steal their organs, indicating a possible link between these crimes and the mafia of human organs detected in the US.

In another related context, the humanitarian relief committee affiliated with the union of Egyptian doctors declared Monday its intention to organize an international and Arab media campaign to expose the Israeli crimes of stealing organs from Palestinians.

The committee called in a statement for opening an investigation into these crimes, stressing that a number of Israeli surgeons are involved in harvesting human organs of Palestinians.

Dr. Abdelkader Hegazy, the head of the committee, said that the union of Egyptian doctors received a letter from the Jordanian union about the ways of cooperation in prosecuting every Israeli involved in committing such crimes.
http://alisonweir.org/journal/2009/12/27/updates-on-israeli-organ-harvesting.html

Israel Admits Stealing Palestinian Organs

For the first time, Israel has tacitly admitted stealing Palestinian body parts for transplant in Jewish patients, vindicating accusations leveled by Palestinians and rights groups over the past years.

"We started to harvest corneas…whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family," pathologist Yehuda Hiss, the former head of the Abu Akbar Center, also known as the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine, told Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, now a professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in a documentary aired by the Israeli Channel Two.

The documentary revealed that in the 1990s, forensic specialists harvested corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Hiss said his doctors often sought to mask the removal of corneas from bodies.

"We'd glue the eyelid shut. We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Other body parts believed to have been harvested from deceased Palestinians and others included heart arteries, bones and corneal tissues.

"The skins were taken from the bodies and transmitted to Hadasah hospital in West Jerusalem on the request of the Israeli army to be transplanted to wounded soldiers and in case of disaster," said Hiss.

Hiss revealed that in the early 1990s, military surgeons began removing a thin layer of skin from bodies to treat burn victims, which he said was done without family consent.

Hughes reportedly decided to publish the interview, recorded in 2000 as part of her studies at the Israeli forensic institute, after a leading Swedish daily reported in August that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians to trade in their organs.


A Swedish journalist revealed earlier this year that Israeli doctors at the Abu Akbar forensic institute had been harvesting organs from Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.

The Aftonbladet report, written by Donald Bostrom, cited an incident of Palestinian organ harvesting by Israel in 1992 during the first Intifada.
Incriminating

Ahmed Teibi, a member of the Israeli Knesset and head of the Arab nationalist Party, insists that the new evidence incriminates the Israeli army and government.

"If such is what they are willing to admit, imagine how much they are concealing," he told IslamOnline.net.

Teibi says the revelations amounted to irrefutable evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the Abu Akbar institute harvested appendages and corneas from bodies of slain Palestinians in the 1990s.

He says the latest revelations underscored the "inherent racism plaguing the Israeli Jewish society."

Teibi was the first to raise questions about the issue of Palestinian organ harvesting by Israeli doctors.

In January, 2002, then Israeli Health Minister Nessim Dahan said in response to a question by Teibi 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."

At that time, Teibi said he had received credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Akbar 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.

The Israeli military confirmed to the Channel Two documentary that the practice of harvest Palestinian organs took place in the 1990ss.

"This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer."

Palestinians, however, insist that the Israeli army continued to harvest Palestinian organs for transplant or for sale in the black market.

Earlier this year, relatives of several Palestinians killed by the Israeli army during Al-Aqsa uprising told IOL that their beloved ones were returned to them shortly after they were killed without their vital organs and with a huge cut from the stomach to the neck stitched up.

* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983.

Sabbah Report

Ukraine academic: Israel imported 25,000 kids for their organs

By Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent

Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.

The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country. It comes a few months after a Swedish tabloid ran an article alleging that Israel Defense Forces soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians for their organs.

Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine, with some figures making anti-Semitic statements and others condemning them. Some candidates, including a Jew and someone whose rivals claim is Jewish, blame a third rival - Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko - for bringing anti-Semitism into the race.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtStEngPE.jhtml?itemNo=1132425&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&title=%27Ukrainian%20academic%20accuses%20Israel%20of%20importing%2025,000%20children%20for%20their%20organs%20%27&dyn_server=172.20.5.5