For months, the government of Israel has demanded the retraction of a story by a Swedish paper that said that Israeli doctors had harvested the organs from dead Palestinians without the consent of their families. The Israeli government canceled visits to Sweden and called the article anti-Semitic. Now, the Guardian is running a new story that says that the allegations are true.
The Guardian says that Israel now admits that it did harvest the organs – a practice that it said ended in the 1990s. The admission was made by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, Dr, Yehuda Hiss. The interview was actually done by an American academic in 2000 and said that doctors 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 interview was released by Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley.
Here is part of her bio:
Her most recent books are: Commodifying Bodies (co-edited with Loic Waquant), 2002, London: Sage (Theory, Culture and Society series). (Commodifying Bodies will appear later this year in an Italian edition with Ombre Courte, Verona, Italia); and Violence in War and Peace: an Anthology (co-edited with Philippe Bourgois), 2003, London and Malden, Mass: Basil Blackwell.
Scheper-Hughes has conducted research, written on, and been politically engaged in topics ranging from AIDS and human rights in Cuba, death squads and the extermination of street kids in Brazil, the Catholic Church, clerical celibacy, and child sex abuse, to the repatriation of the brain of a famous Yahi Indian, Ishi (kept as a specimen in the Smithsonian Institution) to the Pit River people of Northern California. Her most recent research is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global traffic in humans for their organs which she interprets as a form of invisible and sacrificial violence. Her next book, The Ends of the Body: the Global Traffic in Organs, is to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
She is co-founder and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project and she is currently an advisor to the World Health Organization (Geneva) on issues related to global transplantation. Scheper-Hughes has lectured internationally and has been a research professor in residence at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences in Paris in 1993 (and will take up that post again in the fall of 2004).
Notably, Hiss was removed from his post in 2004 when some details about organ harvesting were first reported.
What is now missing is an explanation of the Israeli government’s months of protestations and attacks regarding the original article — when it appears to have known about this program.
For the full story, click here.
Israel.
Do you want to know why you are having such a hard time eliminating anti-Semitism?
It’s crap like this, you morons.
Having a country comes with responsibilities. The Jews, your people supposedly, need a homeland to prevent people like some of our more hateful posters setting up human abattoirs again. You are not helping them avoid the crazies with actions like this and in fact are aiding them in their campaign to paint all Jews as baby-killing flesh eaters that deserve concentration camps.
And that’s ridiculous.
Anyone with any sense knows that there are good Jews and bad Jews just like any other group of people. But some people won’t distinguish between the Neocon warmongering hate driven Likud and the innocent. They’ll just want you all dead. You too, Israel, can be guilty of war crimes and purposefully creating LEGITIMATE hatred directed toward you. So far you are racking up an impressive score. And this? Yeah, this is a legitimate reason to hate Israel. Why? It’s not because you’re Jewish.
It’s because you’re acting like monsters.
You want to be treated like humans? You deserve to be treated like humans . . . when you act like one. I’ll defend the rights of Jews to have free practice. I stipulate they need a home. I also stipulate that the government of Israel is a miserable failure in protecting the interests of the Jewish people and in being a responsible actor on the stage of nation-states. Stealing organs kinda rules you out as being the good guys. That makes using phosphorus shells on civilians look like a playground spat. You’ve just strayed into Mad Scientist Land. Pure evil is what this is and you deserve EVERY bit of heat and scorn and hatred it creates.
You did it to yourself this time. Nice job, Bibi & Crew. See you in Hell.
Although I support the notion that the state of Israel has not been applying International, and their own, law as they should I do think BIL is using rather harsh words of condemnation.
Personally I do not think that even when you are evil incarnate you deserve all kinds of horrible stuff. In other words, everybody should have the same rights and duties regardless of who they are. Yes, that includes those removed from judicial review, and subjected to torture, simply by calling them “enemy combatants.”
A Harvest is a harvest unless you are caught. Organs! weed! Hey I wonder if you can find weed in Oregon? What will they think of next?
Ezekiel 25:17 (King James Version)
17 And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
_____
Tsutsugamushi,
I’m a big fan of the furious rebuke. Unlike Sam Jackson’s character, I don’t use a .45 to do it. I prefer words. And I disagree – the evil deserve to get hammered. They are a drag on both societal advancement and resources. They cause pain to the innocent. That hammering should come at the end of a factual discovery process and a due process trial, but a hammering they do deserve once their evil is exposed.
Buddah.
“You deserve to be treated like humans . . . when you act like one.”
The Israelis and the Palestinians are both acting exactly like humans. The Israelis are behaving exactly as human colonists behave when they colonize land that unfortunately is occupied by untermenchen that have no right to be there. The Palestinians are behaving exactly as normal for humans whose land has been stolen by colonists with accompanying necessary murders but who have not been reduced to the same state of abject demoralization as australia’s un-Austalian aborigines or the USA’s un-American native Americans.
Israel is still in the dispossession phase of colonization and its brutality is proceeding under the eyes of TV cameras. The corresponding phases of US and Australian history are safely in the past and protected by a veil historical amnesia. John Winston Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, good friend of George W Bush, leader of the coalition of the willing to invade Iraq and murder 1.3 million people coined the phrase “black armband history” to describe that of those writers such as Henry Reynolds who wrote about things that actually happened between colonists and aborigines which people like John W Howard think are better forgotten, that is things that white people did to aborigines that would be considered crimes were someone to do the like to us or people like us.
The word inhumane is a silly word and an indication of a defect in human thinking. It should mean behaviour not typical of homo redactum sapiens bardus when it in facts describes behaviour such as genocide, torture and pack rape that is typical of humans.
“Do you want to know why you are having such a hard time eliminating anti-Semitism?
It’s crap like this, you morons.”
I suspect that there are some Israelis who want to provoke antisemitism so that Jews in the rest of the world are forced to pack up and move to Israel. There is more than a bit of suspicion that the Jews who were forced to migrate from Arab nations were so forced by a Zionist bombing campaign and zionist brutality towards Palestinians was in part calculated so as to create hatred of the Jews in their midst by Muslim Arabs in Arab nations.
Buddah.
This is a link to a recent Israeli atrocity inflicted on a defenseless Macintosh laptop.
http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/.
Something went wrong when I posted the link in the previous post. It leads right back here.
I Try again.
http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/
The only thing about such a story that would shock me at this point, would be if they ate the people.
So how do the Israelis of today differ from the Germans of the 1930′s?
Will this question be labled anti-semitic so it is not asked? Being able to classify any tough questions or revelations as anti-semitic is a handy tool to have.
These actions of the Israeli government are reprehensible. Thinking that the Israeli government represents everyone of the Jewish faith is ignorant. The fact that I have to say either of those two things is depressing.
Jay,
Learn to phrase the question in the terms of the duties and responsibility of nation-states in general if you want to avoid a label. There is this thing called “political science”. It’s the language diplomats and experts use when analyzing international relations. There have been many discussions on this site about how Israel is running the risk (if they have not totally rounded the corner) of being classified as an aggressor state. Your phrasing, however, indicates that the part of the analysis you wish to focus on is religion instead of international relations.
Learn to 1) ask question better and 2) with actual utility in a secular framework.
You may be shocked to learn this but not all Jews are happy about Israel’s actions as nation. A lot of Jews think Israel is run by morons and criminals too. They might even talk to you about it if you don’t insist about making the issue Judaism instead of politicians acting like criminals.
So how about addressing the issue in terms of political science instead of false analogy. As soon as the Israelis start running death camps, you can make that comparison. Until then, well, you should really learn how to frame issues properly if you don’t want thinly veiled bigotry to be exposed for what it is.
Of course BiL is correct in the framework of political argument. However, how far removed from death camps are the harvesting of organs from those you hold under what some DO believe is a death camp, already?
It isn’t about religion, except for the nut cases who use religion to further the atrocities we fund and witness.
This is a very thin line, imo.
I have been labeled anti-Semite when I am clearly anti-Zionist and could care less about any religion.
Buelah,
I have to agree on the organ harvesting thing. That’s just beyond the pale. Is it the equivalent of mechanized industrial genocide? No, I think that’s a bit far. But I will stipulate it’s a step in that direction. Inhumanity tends to lead to more inhumanity unless the actions and impulses to act that way are quashed.
And I must say you’ve never struck me as anti-Semitic. I’ve always found your criticisms about Israel to be about the state itself. But then again, I’m not Jewish, other reader may have taken some of your past comments differently than I did.
BiL,
Never here. A contributor at my blog is a Diasporal Jew and wrote the following because I kept getting hit up by straw men building zionists (or their American protectorates):
I AM A DIASPORAL JEW OF THE ASHKENAZ TRIBE AND I HEREBY DECLARE BUELAHMAN AND LYNDA OF BUELAHMAN’S REDSTATE REVOLT TO BE ABSOLUTELY FREE OF ANTI-SEMITISM OF ANY KIND. THEIR VIEWS ON AMERICA’S ISRAEL POLICY IS THE SAME AS MINE. IT IS THE SAME AS WELL OVER 30% OF THE ISRAELI PEOPLE AND OVER 70% OF THE DIASPORAL ASHKENAZ COMMUNITY IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE BOTH THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL.
This simply goes to prove your point about the politics vs religion.
BTW
Some would argue that Gaza is “almost” a death camp. I would suggest that many Gazans would make this claim.
Maybe a death camp is truly in the eyes of the beholder?
On a MUCH lighter note, the reality of the presidency of Obama in a short film:
Or this link if the embed doesn’t work:
http://buelahman.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/barack-obamas-presidency-expressed-in-a-video/
Buelah,
Gaza is a war zone, not a death camp and that is not a matter of perception. When the IDF starts pushing Palestinians into ovens on a schedule after extracting all the gold from their teeth, then you can call it a death camp. You fail to truly appreciate the scope of Reinhardt Heudrich’s little plan if you think a war zone is anything like the atrocities that man planned and executed. You are simply wrong if you think there is an equivalence. Harvest organs? Evil. Big “E”. Concentration Camps? EVIL.
Huge difference.
Heydrich
BiL,
Did I write what “I” think? Or did I write what those who are living the hell think (and shared with me)?
If you wrote that from a comfy chair anywhere in America and not from a cold, concrete basement in Gaza, afraid for your life, then, excuse me if I don’t consider your opinion quite the same as the ones from Gaza who do hold that opinion.
No offense, but these opinions are truly NOT the same. In that, you are correct. Yours appears to be not based from experience or even a story told by a Gazan. Correct me if I am wrong. Explain how many Gazans think they are not in some sort of death camp (or damn near it).
Like I said, this is probably best understood from the people experiencing it (where I got my info).
I wonder if the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto felt like THAT was a death camp in many ways?
Beulah,
I didn’t know you were psychic. How do you know who I know and where I get my information? Quite simply, you don’t. I know Gazans. I know Shoah survivors. Well looky there! You’re full of crap on an assumption right out of the gate!
You’re still wrong about a war zone being the equivalent of industrial genocide as a simple matter of fact. There IS a difference between shooting at people and innocents getting caught in the crossfire and ROUNDING UP PEOPLE INTO CATTLE CARS SO YOU CAN GAS THEM HUNDREDS AT A TIME.
Hill meet Mountain.
You think I’m wrong. I know you are.
Have your opinion. It’s your right. Just like it was your right to make an incorrect assumption that I don’t know members of both parties. But if you want to not be considered a clown? You better back off that Holocaust comparison because you don’t know what the Hell you are talking about. Again, feel free to make false analogies. I won’ stop you from looking like an idiot. I promise.
I find it amazing that you argue such things, when I am telling you that people from there tell me they feel this way. I said SOME feel this way. I didn’t say I did. I even went further to explain WHO told me this.
It IS NOT what I think, BiL. And no matter how much you want to make it between your opinion and mine and that you are such a brilliant person to explain that these people telling me these things are wrong about how they feel.
You are the amazing one, Mr Mental Gymnastics.
So, who is lying about their “feelings”, BiL? Your Gazan sources or mine?
(rolling eyes at an amazing display of contrariety backed by obfuscation and straw men setups)
I expect more from you. Maybe I shouldn’t.
Now, re-read what I have rwritten and tell me that I am giving you my opinion or the ones reported to me.
And then, after you see what a weird-o you became by arguing against what I reported as the feelings of those from there, just come back and set up another straw man.
You are good at that, but truth sometimes evades you due to your total desire to be “right”.
I was going to say that I wish the civilized nations of this world open their doors to the Palestinians who are willing to leave.
Now, I just feel cold.
And maybe you misread what I wrote, Buelah.
You done foaming at the mouth now, Mr. Fails At Basic Definitions?
I certainly . . . don’t care. I have other things to do. You be as wrong as you like, ace. Your friends too. A war zone is not a death camp no matter who screams it or how loudly.
war zone
Function: noun
Date: 1914
1 : a zone in which belligerents are waging war; broadly : an area marked by extreme violence
2 : a designated area especially on the high seas within which rights of neutrals are not respected by a belligerent nation in time of war
concentration camp
Function: noun
Date: 1901
: a camp where persons (as prisoners of war, political prisoners, or refugees) are detained or confined
Now add to that last definition that the Germans were killing the prisoners on a timetable created by Reinhardt Heyrdrich to achieve maximum throughput, e.g. kill as many people as quickly and cheaply as possible.
English. Get acquainted with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhardt_Heydrich
A bit of logic:
1. Most Israeli’s are Jewish.
2. Most Jews are not Israeli’s
3. Some Jews support all of Israel’s actions others do not.
4. Therefore if you’re criticizing Israeli actions please do so by not universalizing it into another comment about Jews.
The logic used in that sense is as faulty as criticizing all Muslims for Al Queda’s activities. It would also be the same logic used for criticizing all Christians because of God Hates Fags and murdering abortion Doctors, or all Catholics as pedophiles.
Do Jews generally support the existence of Israel? Yes as do I.
Levels of support for specific actions vary as do humans vary. It is more than annoying to have to defend my ethnicity based on dislike of Israeli policies. Please don’t respond with some crap like “Well the Jews used the Shoah to defend Israel’s existence” because you would again be generalizing the attitudes of some for an entire group. most here would I think see the falseness of that proposition.
” …. doctors at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers …..”
The Israeli government spent a great deal of energy in covering for the happy harvesters … why would any government want to provide cover for such grotesque behavior … is this just another case of “follow the money”?
“is this just another case of “follow the money”?
Blouise,
Sadly it might well be and anyone could wonder, if the story is true, what in hell were they thinking? Jews are in fact just like other human beings and we all know the insanity of which humans are capable.
That’s some vile s**t right there.
How’s that for perspective?
Blouise and MikeS,
I think you both hit on the answer to this atrocity. Money and greed, with a pinch of arrogance.
I would be fascinated to hear interviews with Israelis who have received tissue/organ transplants. I suspect that they are not told about the origins of the tissues/organs. (Not because of any sort of conspiracy, but rather because it is standard procedure for transplants, in contrast to Hollywood/TV.)
Some of them will have realized that there is a chance that they received either transplants from people who were ethnically Palestinian/Arab and/or that they received transplants from people who did not consent to “harvesting.” I would really like to hear what they have to say and what they think of those possibilities. I’m sure some will be heartbroken that they benefited from such unethical actions, others may be arrogant, and some may be put in a quandary by their own prejudices. I suspect it would be fascinating to try to understand how people would deal with this.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this would not be a good “button to push” with people. There are extraordinary psychological impacts to being a transplant recipient, particularly if you were close to death, and the organ you received, by necessity, came from someone who died. When you add these complicating factors, it could be extremely difficult for the recipients. That’s yet another reason to be very careful about the ethics of organ “donation” and transplantation.
(While I don’t like the “Borat” or “Bruno” type-work that Sacha Baron Cohen does, I’ve always wondered what the result would be if he had done a film of this type in Israel, rather than America.)
Mr. Arch,
Here you go. It’ll take 52 minutes of your time.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1176693725/#
So, a simple question: is “Falun Gong” Chinese for “Palestinian?”
Just asking.
Of course.
Ok,
Its winter time in Texas….
If the Israeli governments actions towards the Palestinians is not a horrible as the 1930′s NAZIs to the Jews, it is similar in attitude; in the de-humanizing of the “Other”, the denial of basic Human Rights to the “Enemy”. That attitude or belief can so easily lead to genocide.
While harvesting organs without the permission of the families may be wrong, (who knows if their families were known?), it is a far cry from the NAZI death doctors who conducted experiments on living human beings with the end purpose of killing them. 60 years is not that long ago.
There are countless ages of cruelty. In the end, people die and their remains may go to help living humans …but that is all lost because …the end does not justify the means.
Also, many great medical advances have been made by Jewish doctors and scientists. Most of the time doctors don’t know the “politics” of the people they are working on.
But then, I find people always quick to condemn others.