Organ trafficking, blood libel, Jewish identity, and Palestinian children

When the FBI recently uncovered an illegal organ* trafficking ring led by Jewish rabbis from Brooklyn and New Jersey, every western media rushed to add that the rabbis were from the Syrian Jewish community.

When a Swedish author recently published an article suggesting that there are indicators that the organs trafficked could have come from Palestinian children killed by the Israeli 'defence' forces (IDF), everybody, from Israel to western media, rushed to mention the story without publishing its original content, assorted by an accusation of blood libel.

The atrocities committed by Zionists are never to be punished, neither to be mentioned. And when they are pointed out, they are never investigated, they are rather met by one generic answer: it is never the Jew's fault, it is other people's fault, either anti-semites or a different kind of Jew. I bet if this story might come to persist, the state of Israel will declare Syrian Jews as unpure Jews...and the IDF is a moral and pure army...

Update: The story has provoked up to now what is starting to look like the Jewish version to the Muslim Danish cartoons uproar, but nobody is noticing, everybody is trying not to draw the comparison and there are no intellectuals defending the Swedish journalist freedom of expression...

Al-Jazeera: Palestinians seek organ theft probe.

Ten shocking facts about organ trafficking

UPDATE, dec 20th 2009: Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs

UPDATE, September 24th 2010: A south African based company, Netcare, accused of performing organ extraction operations on poor brazilians for wealthy Israelis.
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* I stand corrected: I previously wrote that rabbis were trafficking children's organs but a commentator on this blog notified me that we don't know if the organs were children's organs.

''The Best Settlement Argument'': Really ?

The Israel Project, with an advisory board that includes 20 members of Congress from both parties, issued the confidential document to its supporters at about the time Obama came to power in January.

The report, marked as "not for distribution or publication" but since widely disseminated outside of the organisation, says that those who back the removal of the settlements should be told they are supporting ethnic cleansing and antisemitism. The guide offers what it describes as "the best settlement argument".

"The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews," the guide says.

I am all for it. But when proponents of a one state solution advance the idea of one state for Jews and Palestinians, the defenders of Zionism, the same ones who label settlement freezing activity as ethnic cleansing, suggest that Palestinians may outnumber Jews and threaten the idea of Israel as a Jewish state.

I want a clear answer from zionists who often visit this blog as to what to do with population growth for Israeli Arabs; what to do with Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and what to do with Palestinian refugees ? They really have no viable solution, neither a viable answer. Zionism is short on arguments because it does not want to choose between the Jewish identity of Israel and its expansionnist policies. It is a great cognitive dissonance that will lead to greater catastrophes as all cognitive dissonances, which are per essence irrational, do

Another fresh evidence for Israeli war crimes in Gaza

"On the way we saw tanks and soldiers," said Omar Abu Halima, 18. "When we saw them [the Israeli soldiers] they told us to stop. After we stopped they fired at us. They killed my cousin Mattar. My cousin Muhammad was wounded and later died."

In another case – also in al-Atatra – two women holding white flags stepped out of a house that the IDF was demolishing to tell the soldiers that civilians were inside. "We opened the door and a sniper fired at us from a house," said Zakiya al-Qanu, 55. "Ibtisam was hit and I turned to go back inside and another bullet grazed my back. Ibtisam died in the doorway."...
..."These casualties comprise a fraction of the Palestinian civilians wounded and killed," the report says.

"But they stand out because, in each case, the victims were standing, walking or in slowly moving vehicles with other unarmed civilians, and were trying to convey their non-combatant status by waving a white flag."

HRW's press release

Complete report

Darfur: the feelgood conflict

By Mahmoud Mamdani, Le Monde Diplomatique.

When I was in Darfur in 2008, I asked a UN humanitarian officer how much of the $15m Save Darfur had raised in 2007 had really found its way to Darfur. He said none. When I returned to New York, I called a contact in the Save Darfur head office in Washington DC and asked him if this was true. His response was that Save Darfur was not an aid agency but an advocacy group.

To read the rest of this article you may have to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique, the best in analysis, academic, and investigative journalism, in print and on the web.

Palestine: The View From South Africa

Because there is a strong parallell between the history of the oppressed and the oppressors in South Africa and Israel-Palestine, and because despite the strong collaboration between the oppressors on both sides, some in the South African Jewish community fought to be on the right side of their double allegiance.

BY Alain Gresh, Le Monde Diplomatique

The strength of feeling provoked by a conflict thousands of miles away is not entirely surprising, however. It stems from the peculiar nature of the links between South Africa and Israel. By a quirk of history, just a few weeks separate the creation of Israel in May 1948 and the electoral victory of the National Party in South Africa. That election result took the existing racial segregation to a new level by bringing in the policy of apartheid or “separate development”. The leaders of the National Party were known Nazi sympathisers (John Vorster, its leader and later prime minister, was imprisoned on this account during the second world war), but they were nonetheless able to forge increasingly close relations with Israel...

...Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who teaches at the University of Haifa, explained the paradox: “One can detest Jews and love Israelis, because Israelis somehow are not Jews. Israelis are colonial fighters and settlers, just like Afrikaners. They are tough and resilient. They know how to dominate. Jews are different. They are, among other qualities, gentle, non-physical, often passive, intellectual. So one can go on disliking Jews while admiring the Israelis”.

To continue reading you may have to subscribe, Le Monde Diplomatique is worth a subscription, it is one of the few printed and web journalism with high quality academic and investigative journalism, nothing to do with the instant, curated, and short sighted journalism that is triumphing now on the internet.

Supressing evidence of torture is a criminal offence

The Bush and Obama administrations have been, under different motives, hiding evidence of torture performed by US personnel, and Mrs Clinton is now asking their ally, the UK, to supress evidence of torture of one of their citizen, Binyam Mohammad, at Guantanamo.

This is clearly a criminal offence, says Human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, and another exrecise in 'naked political power', according to the British judge who is in charge of the case of Mohammad.

Illegal evictions of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem

(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
The eviction is illegal because it was decided by an court order from the occupying entity, Israel, and not by an international court, despite wide international international condemnation of such a practice by Israel. This is a land acquired by war and agressions...Israel does not abide by international law.

All Palestine was acquired by terrorism, war of agressions, and occupation, and Israel does not have the intention to stop this practice.

Nasser Ghawi, one of the evicted Palestinians, said his family had been living in the house for 53 years before the Israeli forces came and broke down the doors. Maher Hanoun, the head of the other evicted family, was out on the street along with Mr. Ghawi.

“I do not need a tent or rice,” Mr. Hanoun said. “What I need is to return to my house where I and my children were born.”

A total of 38 members of the Ghawi family were removed from six apartments that made up one of the houses. The Hanoun family numbers 17.

Iran's Protesters' Trial: Confronting the West on Torture

The trial of Iran's protesters has renewed the urgency of a clear condemnation of Torture in the West. Mousavi, who is championed by the West, is accusing the regime of torturing the protesters before the trial and declared the statements of the accused as invalid because they were extracted under torture.
Mousavi knows very well what he is talking about. He presided, with the same techniques, over the trials of Iranian leftists at the hands of the new Mollahs regime, after the overthrow of the Shah.
This is an occasion for those in the West who champion democracy and regime change in Iran: will they condemn the torture of the protesters or will they remian silent ? Or will they, once again, try to justify torture for some and condemn it for others ?

A portrait of Mousavi and an analysis of the current inside struggle for power among Iran's religious elite.