In August Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing
grisly evidence suggesting that Israel had been taking Palestinian internal
organs. The article, by veteran photojournalist Donald Bostrom, called for an
international investigation to discover the facts.1
Israel immediately accused Bostrom and the newspaper of “anti-Semitism,” and
charged that suggesting Israelis could be involved in the illicit removal of
body parts constituted a modern “blood libel” (medieval stories of Jews killing
people for their blood).2
Numerous Israeli partisans repeated these accusations, including
Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin, who asserted that the story was “merely
the tip of the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel
hate.”3 Others suggested that the newspaper was “irresponsible” for
running such an article.4
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 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 Organ Watch, and the author of
scholarly books and articles on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream
media call upon when they need expert commentary on the topic.5
While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers and procurers come from
numerous nations and ethnicities, including Americans and Arabs, she is
unflinchingly honest in speaking about the Israeli connection:
“Israel is at the top,” she states. “It has tentacles reaching out
worldwide.”6
In a lecture last year sponsored by New York’s PBS 13 Forum, Scheper-Hughes
explained that Israeli organ traffickers, “had and still 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.”
Lest this sound simply like a successful international concern, it’s
important to understand the nature of such a business.
As Scheper-Hughes describes it, organ trafficking consists of “paying the
poor and the hungry to slowly dismantle their bodies.”
Organ traffickers prey on the world’s poorest, most desperate citizens—slum
dwellers, inhabitants of dying villages, people without means or hope.
Traffickers promise them what seem like astronomical sums of money (from $1,000
to $10,000)—which they frequently don’t even deliver—in return for vital
internal organs.
For traffickers, human body parts are commodities, to be cut out of the
bodies of the poor and sold to the rich. The organ “donors” receive no follow-up
care and end up worse off on many levels—physically, financially,
psychologically, socially—than even their original tragic situation. Sometimes
they are coerced into such “donations.”
Organ sales have been illegal in most countries for years. The United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which covers prevention,
enforcement and sanctions in trafficking of humans, includes in its definition
of human exploitation the extraction of organs for profit.7 Israel
finally passed legislation against organ trafficking in 2008.8, 9
In her Forum 13 lecture Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of
Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling:
“Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust.”
She described speaking with Israeli brokers who 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.’”
Scheper-Hughes says that she “even heard doctors saying that.”
For many years Israelis in need of an internal organ have gone on what
experts call “transplant tourism”—traveling to other nations to obtain internal
organs. Sometimes body parts are obtained from those freshly dead; more often
from the desperately needy. While affluent people from numerous countries and
ethnicities engage in this practice, Israel is unique in several significant
ways.
First, Israelis engage in this 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-fifth that of
Europe, according to BBC. This is in part because there has been a widespread
impression that Jewish religious law prohibits transplants as a “desecration of
the body.”10 The Israeli news service Ynet reports, “the percentage
of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic
groups.”11
Third, the Israeli government has enabled the practice. For many years the
Israeli health system subsidized its citizens’ “transplant holidays,”
reimbursing Israelis $80,000 for medical operations abroad. Much of the
remaining costs could often be obtained from government-subsidized12
Israeli insurance plans.13 In addition, Israel’s Ministry of Defense
was directly involved.
Scheper-Hughes discussed Israeli organ trafficking in detail in 2001 in
published testimony to the Subcommittee on International Relations and Human
Rights of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.14 In her extensive
testimony, Scheper-Hughes stated that although Israel had become a pariah for
its organ policies, Israeli officials exhibited “amazing tolerance…toward
outlawed ‘transplant tourism.’”
She described an international syndicate which was “organized through a local
business corporation in conjunction with a leading transplant surgeon, operating
out of a major medical center not far from Tel Aviv,” and which had forged links
with transplant surgeons in Turkey, Russia, Moldavia, Estonia, Georgia, Romania,
and New York City.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense was directly involved in what Scheper-Hughes
called Israel’s “‘illicit [in other nations] national ‘program’ of transplant
tourism…Members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them”
accompanied transplant junkets.
In her Forum 13 lecture, Scheper-Hughes said that investigating Israeli organ
trafficking over the past decade had taken her “from country to country to
country to country.”
One of these is Moldova, the poorest country in Europe—and homeland of
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—where 90 percent of the people earn
less than $2 a day. A 2001 BBC report on organ trafficking described the
situation: “Hundreds of Israelis have created a production line that starts in
the villages of Moldova, where men today are walking around with one
kidney.15
Another is Brazil, where a legislative commission found that 30 [it may
actually have been as high as 60] Brazilians from impoverished neighborhoods had
sold their kidneys to a trafficking ring headed by Israelis, with Israeli
citizens receiving almost all of the organs, and the Israeli government
providing most of the funding.16
The ring had also begun inquiring about buying other vital organs from poor
residents, including lungs, livers and corneas.17
An Inter Press Service (IPS) news story from the time reported that
Scheper-Hughes testified to the commission that international trafficking of
human organs had begun some 12 years earlier, promoted by Zaki Shapira, head of
kidney transplant services at Bellinson Medical Center, near Tel Aviv.
Scheper-Hughes reported that Shapira had performed more than 300 kidney
transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries such as
Turkey. The recipients were very wealthy or had very good health insurance, and
the “donors” very poor people from Eastern Europe, the Philippines and other
developing countries.
The chairman of the Brazilian commission, physician Raimundo Pimentel, was
outraged at Israeli policies, pointing out that trafficking can only take place
on a large scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli
health system. Pimentel charged that the resources provided by the Israeli
health system “were a determining factor” in enabling a network that preyed on
society’s poorest populations.
In 2004 there were reports that Israeli traffickers had added China to their
target donor populations.18 In one recent case an Israeli paid an
organ broker $100,000 for a kidney transplant in China from an 18-year-old
Chinese girl. She received $5,000 and died following surgery.19
New York Times reporter Larry Rohter pointed out that allowing
brokers to operate with few restrictions benefited Israel “by exporting Israel’s
organ shortage overseas.” Rohter cites a kidney specialist at Hadassah Hospital
in Jerusalem who explained that patients who go abroad “‘save the country a lot
of money; not only in terms of what doesn’t have to be spent on dialysis, but
also by opening places for other people who are on the list.’”20
Many people find governmental complicity in organ trafficking deeply
troubling on moral and philosophical grounds.
As Scheper-Hughes testified: “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.” She believes that the risks and benefits
of organ transplant surgery should be more equally distributed among nations,
ethnic groups, and social classes.
Organ theft
It is difficult to know how often Israeli trafficking involves outright theft
of vital organs from living human beings.
It is not rare for the “donor” to receive little or none of the compensation
promised. For example, in 2007 Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that
two Israelis had confessed to persuading Palestinians “from the Galilee and
central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to
have a kidney removed for payment.” According to the Haaretz report,
after the organ had been taken the traffickers refused to pay for them.
On occasion, people are coerced into giving up their organs. For example,
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, the alleged Brooklyn trafficker recently arrested in an
FBI sweep in New Jersey, reportedly carried a gun. When a potential organ seller
would try to back out, Rosenbaum would use his finger to simulate firing a gun
at the person’s head.
The Rosenbaum case, reportedly part of a ring centered in Israel, is the
first case of trafficking to be prosecuted in the US. His arrest and the
substantial evidence against him may have surprised State Department
Countermisinformation Director Todd Leventhal, who had characterized organ
trafficking as an “urban legend,” stating, “It would be impossible to
successfully conceal a clandestine organ-trafficking ring.” Leventhal called
such reports “irresponsible and totally unsubstantiated.”
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
in Beilinson Hospital in Israel’s Petah Tikva for a stroke. When his family
finally 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 these they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed
with bandages and the heart was missing.21
During this time, the Israeli press was heralding the historic heart
transplant, performed by a team of surgeons who were to become some of Israel’s
most celebrated physicians, among them Dr. Morris Levy, Dr. Bernardo Vidne, and
Dr Jack Solomon, who harvested the heart.22
When the family began to ask questions, the hospital denied any connection.
After the man’s wife and brother had raised a media furor, petitioned three
cabinet ministers—and agreed to sign a document that they would not sue—the
hospital finally admitted it was Sadegat’s heart that had been used.
Haaretz quoted Sadegat’s tearful wife: “They treated him like an
alley cat. 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 before his heart was removed has not been made
public. It is possible—perhaps probable—that up until his heart was removed it
was still beating; according to an Israeli media report, “once a heart stops
beating, it is no longer fit for transplantation.”23
Even if he was what is now termed “brain dead,” the general view is that
family members should at least be a party to decisions regarding the patient:
first, whether to “pull the plug,” and, second, whether to donate an organ. At
the time, however, Israeli law allowed organs to be harvested without the
family’s consent.
Forty years later the hospital held an anniversary celebration of the
transplant, despite the fact that, according to Haaretz, the heart had
been obtained “through deceit and trickery.” The festivities, which honored
surviving members of the transplant team, featured balloons and a red,
heart-shaped cake.
In this incident of organ theft (and from a possibly living body), the family
was Israeli. Had the wife and brother been Palestinians from the West Bank or
Gaza, they would not have possessed the power to force a confession from the
hospital, and it is likely that those individuals today calling the Swedish
article a “blood libel” or “irresponsible journalism” would have applied the
same epithets to journalists reporting questions concerning the historic Israeli
heart transplant—if any reporters even bothered or dared to do so.
Yehuda Hiss, keeper of the morgue
Perhaps one of the most long-term and high-level cases of organ theft—and one
that involves Palestinian as well as Israeli organs—concerns an extraordinarily
high official: Dr. Yehuda Hiss, Israel’s chief pathologist and, from 1988
through 2004, director of Israel’s state morgue, the L. Greenberg Institute of
Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir.
An early indication of malfeasance came to light in 1998 and concerned a
Scottish man named Alisdair Sinclair, who had died under questionable
circumstances after being taken into custody at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport.
The Israeli story, as reported by the Israeli news magazine Jerusalem
Report, is that Sinclair had confessed to transporting drugs, even though
none were found, although he was in possession of 9,000 German marks ($5,000).
He then, the police claim, hanged himself by looping his shoelaces and T-shirt
around a towel bar about a meter off the ground and slipped the improvised noose
around his neck. From a squatting position, the police story goes, he repeatedly
threw his bodyweight downward, choking himself.
Sinclair did not die, however, and medics were able to restore a heartbeat.
He was transferred to a hospital where, according to the magazine report, the
hospital’s associate director, Dr. Yigal Halperin, said that Sinclair “had
suffered irreversible brain damage, and there was little doctors could do for
him. Left in a corner of the emergency room, he died at 7 p.m. [It’s unknown
whether he had been put on life support.] His corpse was transferred to the
Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir for an autopsy.”
Afterwards, Israeli authorities located Sinclair’s family and gave them three
weeks to dispose of the body. They suggested that he be buried in a Christian
cemetery in Israel, pointing out that this would be one-third the cost of
shipping the body back to Scotland. However, the grieving family scraped up the
money to bring him home.
They had a second autopsy performed by Glasgow University, only to discover
that Sinclair’s heart and a small bone in his throat called the hyoid were
missing. The British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel, and a heart was sent
to Scotland. According to the Jerusalem Report, the family “wanted the
Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed
their brother’s, but the Institute’s director, Prof. Jehuda Hiss, refused,
citing the prohibitive cost.”
Despite a protest from the British government, Israel refused to supply
Hiss’s pathology findings or the police report. According to the British
government and a report in the Israeli media, around the time of Sinclair’s
death a doctor at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital put in a request for a hyoid bone
for research purposes—and eventually received a bill for shipping
costs.24 Israel retained Sinclair’s $5,000.
Through the years Hiss and the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic medicine
continued to be accused of organ theft. In 2000 the Israeli newspaper Yediot
Ahronot published an investigative report alleging that Hiss had been
extracting organs without permission and then packing the bodies with
broomsticks and cotton wool to fill in cavities before burial. The report
charged that under Hiss the institute had been involved in organ sales of body
parts—“legs, thighs, ovaries, breasts and testicles,” allegedly to medical
institutions.
In 2001 a district judge found the Institute had performed hundreds of
autopsies and had removed body parts without the families’ permission—and
sometimes in direct opposition to their expressed wishes.25 One
report described a “museum of skulls” at the institute.
Little was done, however, and complaints continued—often by the parents of
dead Israeli soldiers horrified to discover that body parts had been taken from
their sons. Finally, in 2004 Israel’s health minister transferred directorship
of the morgue itself away from Hiss. Hiss, however, retained his position as
Israel’s chief pathologist, a post it appears he holds to this day.26,
27
Hiss had also been connected with two previous national scandals, both of
which may have involved powerful people in Israel, which may account for his
longevity in Israel’s medical establishment despite years of proven
wrongdoing.
The first controversy concerned the “Yemenite Children’s Affair”—a situation,
largely from the early 1950s, in which a thousand babies and small children of
recent immigrants to Israel had “disappeared.”
When the immigrants had arrived as part of Israel’s “ingathering of the
exiles,” babies were immediately taken from their mothers and placed in
children’s houses. Many were hospitalized for a variety of ills, and hundreds
died, their deaths coming in such large numbers that they were announced over
loudspeakers.
The distraught parents often never saw the body or received a death
certificate, and there were growing suspicions that not all had died—some, it
was believed, had been “given” to Ashkenazi parents. One author writes: “It was
a well-known fact within the Jewish community in the United States that if a
family wanted a child they could go to [baby brokers, both rabbis] and simply
pay the necessary fee.”28
Some Israeli investigators have found considerable evidence for these
charges, and indications of complicity at multiple levels of the power
structure. In fact, one researcher charges: “People in positions of power at the
time that the State of Israel was established profited from the abduction and
sale of children from poor immigrant families.”29
Hiss’ connection comes in 1997, when Israel finally had formed a committee to
investigate the disappearance of Yemenite and other Jewish children in the years
1948-1954. Among those testifying before this committee was a California woman
who had come to Israel searching for her biological mother—and, according to DNA
testing by a geneticist at Hebrew University, had found her.
The committee demanded that another DNA test be conducted at the Abu Kabir
forensic institute. As at least one observer predicted ahead of time, Hiss’s
test came up negative, and the government was allegedly exonerated, despite the
fact that the geneticist who had conducted the first tests stood by his
results.30
Hiss also plays a role in some conspiracy theories regarding the 1995
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who had begun a peace process
with Palestinians. In March 1999 a group of academics presented findings
alleging that Hiss had submitted false evidence to the commission that
investigated the killing.31
Palestinian Victims
Israelis have also targeted Palestinians, a particularly vulnerable
population on numerous levels.
In her congressional subcommittee testimony, Scheper-Hughes reported that
before he moved overseas, Israeli hospital transplant head Zaki Shapira had
located kidney sellers “amongst strapped Palestinian workers in Gaza and the
West Bank.” She said that his “hand was slapped by an ethics board,” and he
moved his practice overseas.
For decades numerous Palestinians and others have charged Israel with taking
body parts from Palestinians they had wounded or killed.
In her subcommittee testimony, Scheper-Hughes testified that toward the end
of the apartheid period in South Africa, “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 Washington Report for Middle East Affairs article by Mary Barrett
(see “Autopsies
and Executions,” April 1990 Washington Report, p. 21) reported
“widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank
since the intifada began in December of 1987.”
Barrett quotes a forensic physician: “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?”
A 2002 news story from IRNA reported that three Palestinian boys aged 14-15
had been killed by Israeli forces on Dec. 30, their bodies finally being
returned for burial on Jan. 6. According to the report: “shortly before burial,
Palestinian medical authorities examined the bodies and found out that the main
vital organs were missing from the bodies.” In an interview on Al Jazeera,
President Yasser Arafat held up photos of the boys, saying, “They murder our
kids and use their organs as spare parts.”
Journalist Khalid Amayreh, recently investigating this topic further, found
that “several other Palestinians gave a similar narrative, recounting how they
received the bodies of their murdered relatives, mostly men in their early
twenties, with vital organs taken away by the Israeli authorities.”
Israel has consistently characterized such accusations as “anti-Semitic,” and
numerous other journalists have discounted them as exaggerations.
However, according to the pro-Israel Forward magazine, the truth of
these charges was, in fact, confirmed by an Israeli governmental investigation a
number of years ago.
In a recent story critical of the Swedish article, the Forward
actually confirmed its main point, that Israel had been taking the body parts of
slain Palestinians. The Forward article reported that one of the
governmental investigations into Hiss had revealed that “he seemed to view every
body that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game
for organ harvesting.”32
Over the years, a great many Palestinian bodies have “ended up” in the
Israeli morgue. In numerous cases Israeli occupation forces have taken custody
of wounded or dead Palestinians. Sometimes their bodies are never returned to
their grieving families—Palestinian NGOs say there are at least 250 such cases.
In other cases the bodies have been returned to the families days later, with
crudely stitched naval-to-chin incisions. On many occasions Israeli soldiers
have delivered the bodies late at night and required the bereaved families to
bury their children, husbands, and brothers immediately, under Israeli military
guard, sometimes with the electricity shut off.
In 2005 an Israeli soldier33 described a military doctor who gave
“medics lessons in anatomy” using the bodies of Palestinians 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,’ the soldier said.
“‘He explained the various parts to us—the membrane that covers the lungs,
the layers of the skin, the liver, stuff like that,’ the soldier continued. ‘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.’”34
While most Israeli investigations into organ theft have largely ignored the
Palestinian component, a number of significant facts are known:
- Palestinian organs were harvested during years of an astonishingly lax
system in which the body parts even of Jewish Israelis were extracted illicitly
at the national morgue by the chief pathologist and exchanged for money.
- Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are largely a captive population.
Numerous reports by highly reputable Israeli and international organizations
have documented a situation in which Palestinians have few if any real rights;
Israeli forces have killed civilians with impunity, imprisoned massive numbers
of people without benefit of trials, and routinely abused prisoners.
- Israeli authorities have conducted numerous autopsies of Palestinians
without permission of their families, without even a semblance of public
transparency, and without, it appears, accompanying reports. For example, the
families of those who were taken while still alive are not provided with a
medical report stating time and cause of death.
- A very small but significant minority of Israelis, including military
officers and governmental ministers, hold extremist supremacist views relevant
to 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, 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.” Ginzburgh elaborated: “Jewish life has infinite
value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than
non-Jewish life.” [The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12,
31]
While most Israelis strenuously repudiate such beliefs, Rabbi Moshe
Greenberg, an Israeli scholar on Jewish scriptural views on racism and ethnic
chauvinism, has said, “The sad thing is, these statements are in our books.”
Greenberg, who was a professor at Hebrew University, pointed out that such
Talmudic texts were “purely theoretical” at the time of their writing, because
Jews did not have the power to carry them out. Now, he pointed out, “they’re
carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.”
While it is impossible to know whether any Israelis have ever acted on such
religious permission to kill a non-Jew in order to provide body parts to Jews,
some observers have considered this a possibility.
Dr. A. Clare Brandabur, a distinguished American scholar who has lived and
traveled extensively in Palestine, writes that the information published in the
Swedish article “resonates with reports from Palestinians in Gaza which I heard
during the first intifada.”
She comments, “When I interviewed Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, head of the Red
Crescent in Gaza, I mentioned to him 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 bookbag 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 says: “I asked Dr. Shafi if he had considered the possibility that these
killings were being done for organ transplant, since (as Israel Shahak notes in
Jewish History, Jewish Religion), 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. Dr. Shafi said he had suspected such things but since they
had no access to the records of Abu Kabir Hospital, there was no way to verify
these suspicions.”
Scheper-Hughes, in her congressional testimony, describes the danger of
“organs got by any means possible including (I was told by one guilt-ridden
practitioner) chemically inducing the signs of brain death in dying patients of
no means and with access to minimal social support or family surveillance.”
Whether or not there have ever been organ-inspired murders in Israel as it
appears there have elsewhere, numerous groups around the world are urging an
international investigation into Israel’s handling of Palestinian bodies in its
custody.
However, the Israeli government and its powerful advocates abroad, who
regularly block investigations into Israeli actions, are doing their utmost to
prevent this one.35, 36 Several lawsuits have been filed against the
Swedish newspaper, the largest by Israeli lawyer and IDF officer Guy Ophir, who
filed a $7.5 million lawsuit in New York against the newspaper and Bostrom.
Ophir declared that Israel must “silence the reporter and the
newspaper.”37
International investigations, of course, have two results: the innocent are
absolved, the guilty discovered.
It is clear which category Israel believes it falls into.
Footnotes:
1 Bostrom, Donald, “Our sons plundered for their organs,”
Aftonbladet, Aug. 17, 2009 , translated by Tlaxcala.
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
(Original Swedish version at http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab )
2 Israel Insider, “Netanyahu to press Sweden to condemn
blood libel,” Aug. 23, 2009
http://israelinsider.ning.com/profiles/blogs/netanyahu-to-press-sweden-to
3 Tobin, Jonathan, “Swedish Anti-Semites Dig Up a Blood Libel,”
CommentaryMagazine.com, Aug. 20, 2009
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/76522
4 Cassel, Matthew, “Baseless organ theft accusations will not
bring Israel to justice,” The Electronic Intifada, Aug. 24, 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10730.shtml
5Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, “The Organ of Last Resort,” UNESCO,
www.unesco.org, July, 2001
http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_07/uk/doss34.htm
University of California Berkeley Anthropology Faculty CV: Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, Chancellor’s Professor in Medical Anthropology, Head, Doctoral
Program in Medical Anthropology, Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the
Body, Director, Organs Watch
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nsh.html
6 Griffin, Drew and David Fitzpatrick, “Donor says he got
thousands for his kidney,” CNN Special Investigations Unit, CNN, Sept. 2, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/01/blackmarket.organs/index.html
7Osava, Mario, “BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to Trans-Atlantic
Trafficking Ring,” Inter Press Service (IPS), Feb. 23, 2004
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
8 Yeshiva World News, “CNN: Israel a Leader in Organ Trafficking,”
Sept. 3, 2009
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/38973/CNN:+Israel+a+Leader+in+Organ+Trafficking.html
9Chabin, Michele, “Organ Donation: Legal, But Still
Controversial,” Jewish Week, April 9, 2008
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c40_a7588/News/Israel.html
10Rohter, Larry, “Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of
Poverty and Hope,” The New York Times, May 23, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
11Shapira-Rosenberg, Efrat, “A mitzvah called organ donation,”
Ynet News, June 10, 2007
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3388529,00.html
12 Rohter, Larry, op. cit.
13Ibid.
14 “Organs for Sale: China’s Growing Trade and Ultimate Violation
of Prisoners’ Rights,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, House
of Representatives, 107th Congress, First Session, June 27, 2001,
Serial No. 107–29
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa73452.000/hfa73452_0f.htm
15 Lloyd-Roberts, Sue, “Europe’s poorest country supplying organs
to its neighbours,” BBC Newsnight, 9/7/01
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1437345.stm
16 “BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring,”
Mario Osava, IPS, Feb. 23, 2004
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
17New York Times
18 “Israeli organ traffickers shift operations to China,”
BioEdge, June 4, 2004
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/7726/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
19 “CNN: Israel a Leader in Organ Trafficking,” Yeshiva World
News, Sept. 3, 2009
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/38973/CNN:+Israel+a+Leader+in+Organ+Trafficking.html
20“Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope,”
New York Times, Larry Rohter, May 23, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th
21 “40 years after Israel’s first transplant, donor’s family says
his heart was stolen,” Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz, Dec., 14, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046041.html
22“40 years on, medical staffers from Israel’s first human heart
transplant reminisce about the feat,” Judy Siegel, Jerusalem Post, Dec.
7, 2008
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-159077338.html
23“Shas swing vote pushes through organ donor law,” Shahar Ilan,
Haaretz, March 25, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/968084.html
“With top rabbis’ blessing, Knesset approves organ donation law,” Shahar
Ilan, Haaretz, Aug. 7, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/967871.html
24 “Scottish Tourist’s Family Rejects Out-of-Court Settlement,”
Netty C. Gross, The Jerusalem Report, Jan. 29, 2001
25“Attorney-General lodges complaint against Abu Kabir coroner,”
Dan Izenbert, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2003
26 “Hiss fired for repeated body-part scandals,” Judy Siegel,
Jerusalem Post, May 11, 2004
27 “Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,”
Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
28 “Were the Children Sold?” Yechiel A. Mann, Stop-Abuse.net
http://stop-abuse.net/ym5.htm
29 “The Missing Children,” Yechiel A. Mann, Stop-Abuse.net
http://stop-abuse.net/ym1.htm
30 “Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,”
Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
31“Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,”
Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
32“Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem,”
By Rebecca Dube, Forward, Published Aug. 26, 2009, issue of Sept. 4,
2009
http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
33“Palestinian corpse used for IDF anatomy lesson,” Amos Harel,
Haaretz, Jan. 28, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=533018
34 “The Swedish canard—not only smoke, but also fire,” Shraga
Elam, Aug. 25, 2009 (posted Sept. 4, 2009)
(Hebrew: http://cafe.themarker.com/view.php?t=1192567 )
http://shraga-elam.blogspot.com/2009/09/swedish-canard-not-only-smoke-but-also.html
35 “Israeli lawyer sues Swedish paper,” JTA, Aug. 27, 2009
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/08/27/1007480/israeli-lawyer-sues-swedish-paper
36 “Israeli lawyer sues ‘Aftonbladet’ in NY Court,” E.B. Solomont,
Jerusalem Post, Aug. 26, 2009
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145124980&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
37 “Israeli Reservists To Sue Swedish Newspaper,” David Bedein,
The Bulletin, August 30, 2009
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/09/04/news/world/doc4a9aa59f46ce3700709743.prt
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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs