Sure, we put criminals in jail in large countries because we can replace them even if they are highly skilled.
No snark, at all, but honestly, why? What’s so disgusting about it, and what’s unethical about taking totally unneeded once-possessions from a former-person and using them to help improve the lives of the living?
Would it be different if the squick factor was removed, if instead of organs someone had magical pieces of jewelry that had the power to heal the sick? Meat is meat, and I’m not really able to figure out why it’s disgusting or particularly unethical. There is no living person whose rights you are violating or who you are harming, and there are potentially quite a few living people whose lives you are improving, perhaps even dramatically. In my book, that makes it quite ethical. Nor do I get the ‘disgusting’ part. If I had a pair of shoes that could enable the paralyzed to walk again (or whatever), and they were no use to my family due to someone requiring the exact same shoe size down to the micrometer and the shoes would just go in a landfill anyways, why would it be disgusting to give my shoes to someone so they could walk again?
Why is it so different if we substitute “corneas” for “shoes” and “see again” for “walk again?”
Why? What’s so ghoulish about it? Holding someone down and removing their organs (So… can we have your liver?) is one thing, but taking necessary organs out of a corpse rather than letting them become wormchow? It seems much more disturbing that we’d refrain from taking those organs and instead allow them to rot. To me, that is truly disgusting and immoral.
“Sorry, we know you’d like to have a new heart valve, and we have a perfectly good one here, but we’re going to throw it into the garbage. Guess you have to die.”
Of course they don’t, that would be barbaric and pure evil.
Equally certain, once you are dead, the thing we called “you” aint there anymore. We do not have a right to your organs, because you are using them. We do have a right to corpses’ organs because not only are they not in use, but they cannot potentially be used other than by organ transplant (unless you count the benefit to microbal life and carrion eaters and such).
Me, my money and my concern is on the living, not the dead and not the putrifying bacteria.
Can you please elaborate a bit on your position?
I agree with you (in principle) but people have to choose that. You can’t force that on them. No one - especially a government - has a right to use a corpse as a buffet for organs.
When an eye is made, it is made for that organism specifically; conversely, a Nike shoe it is made for anyone whose feet can fit in. Organs are not interchangeable like different brands of batteries; life-long immunosuppresants are required to stave off rejection. So who in Israel is likely to afford the surgery to place a pilfered organ in their body and the means to purchase anti-rejection drugs? The Israelis? The Arab-Israelis? The Palestinians? The Gazans?
Now, you asked why is it unethical. It’s unethical because its creepy. Its not how humans typically treat the remains of other human beings (even their enemies).
- Honesty
I already pointed out that you cannot take organs from a person.
I also pointed out that ex-persons are not the same as persons, no, not even if they’re pining for the fjords.
A distinction without any difference. If someone else can use your corneas, they can use them. It doesn’t matter if they need to say the magic words and spin around in a circle three times, others can still use them.
First of all, I’d hope that it’s obvious why “creepy = unethical” is nonsense.
Second of all, I’d again point to the fact that the program had no bias at all and used IDF corpses the same as it did any other.
Third, a big wet wombat upon “typical”; typical behavior no more defines ethics than do subjectively held opinions on what is or is not “creepy”.
You have evidence for this claim?
This is where I come down on Alessan’s side of the fence.
The story you drug up says only that a forensic operation got involved in harvesting tissue from cadavers and that the sources of the cadavers extended acrosss the spectrum of professions and national and ethnic origins. I dd not see where your story made any claim that the cadavers were the result of military action. That is your supposition. They could just as easily have been a random selection of car accident victims, old age deaths, suicides, and heart failures.
Do you have an actual citation that the forensics outfit used only bodies that were lilled by the IDF and its violent opponents?
Alessan said it himself. Israel has one center for this sort of thing. If you want to nitpick on ‘proof’ fine, go ahead. I can’t prove anything. But the ‘circumstantial’ evidence points to a high likelihood that this was the case.
No, he didn’t. He said it covered criminal forensic pathology.
Seems that Tom’s supposition is much more likely than yours.
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Ok, so where do the dead killed by the military go?
One article quotes Scepter-Hughes, who is very popular to quote in these articles and an expert on illegal organ trade, as saying that some of the Palestinians were killed during ‘conflicts’ and this is described as being due to military raids:
[Scheper-Hughes said that some of the dead Palestinians from whom organs were harvested were killed during military raids.
“Some of the bodies were definitely Palestinians who were killed in conflicts,” she told Al Jazeera.
“Their organs were taken without consent of families and were used to serve the needs of the country in terms of hospitals as well as the army’s needs.”](Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera)
It would not surprise me, at all, to discover that deaths resulting from IDF actions were examined at that lab. That however, (and note how often the word “some” is prominently featured in the quotes you provide), does nothing to support an implication that Palestinians were a prime target of these actions or even made up a substantial number of the victims. I am quite sure that many Palestinians were grossly offended by the actions–as were, I am sure, many Israelis.
However, a claim that Israel, (as opposed to a few loose cannons in an Israeli facility) was “harvesting” Palestinian organs, (as opposed to the organs of any corpse in Israel, regardless of nationality or ethnicity), and then linking that ten year old story to the false claims of the much more recent Swedish story, is misleading at its most benign interpretation.
Come back with the actual numbers of dishonored bodies sorted by ethnicity and cause of death and we can talk. Until then, this is nothing more than an attempt to establish a nonexistent link between two separate events–one a minor scandal by individuals and the other a manufactured claim of government malfeasance many years after the fact of the first.
It would be interesting if there was some sort of complete ledger that told exactly whose organs went to whom, but somehow I doubt we’ll see that. That’s a pretty high evidentiary standard.
I am satisfied thinking that it’s probable that this occurred. If you want to wait for proof that will likely never come. That’s fine, you are welcome to that high standard. Doesn’t really matter to me either way. I find your notion that bodies killed in military actions were brought there but likely were not harvested a bit specious.
‘Ok Avner, you can harvest from the dead rapist, but not from the dead gunmen.’
Pretty much all the articles and this entire thread make it clear that we are talking about a few individuals led by the sinister Dr. Hiss and that one or more Palestinians were included among the cadavers. Now we can say that one or more of the Palestinians included were killed during military action.
There is no clear link between this story and the Swedish story. No article said that Dr. Hiss took kidneys for example. The fact that it happened once and for such a long period of time makes me wonder if other groups of nefarious individuals might have been out for kidneys or something. I can’t imagine the Palestinians giving a shit if it was a group of ghouls or the Israeli government, and interpreted the actions of some individuals in uniform as government policy. Nothing supports any of this speculation though.
People are also discussing subjects such as “Hiss’ Weak Punishment” without the benefit of facts and “Ethics of Nonconsensual Organ Harvesting” without the benefit of facts. I am most interested in “How Unbelievably Pissed Off I’d Be if My Brother’s Skin, Obtained After Being Shot by An IDF Soldier, was Providing my Enemy and Occupier with a Hide”. A story like this will invite all sorts of tangential discussions including comparisons to the Swedish story, many of which are without the benefit of facts.
I actually think it’s quite likely that there is a link between these two events. According to Alessan this story has been known in Israel for a long time. The story has probably been discussed among Palestinians as well. With the degree of mistrust Palestinians in general hold against the Israeli government and the way stories tend to be embellished over time, it seems quite likely that this true story in part inspired the Aftonbladet story.
I also find it amusing that when the Aftonbladet story broke it was blood libel to claim that Israelis would take Palestinian organs, but now that is perfectly okay because the people in question also took Israeli organs. :rolleyes:
It should be noted that while Boström’s article was written recently, it describes events that are supposed to have taken place in May 1992.
Sort of like the CIA’s experiments on giving LSD to unknowing people justify believing that the CIA instituted the crack cocaine epidemic? “One is true, and you can’t prove to me the other didn’t happen, so it’s reasonable to believe it”?
You might find it less “amusing” to research the history of blood libels, what they center around (alleged singling out and preying on non-Jewish ethnic groups) and the extreme violence these rumors and fables have engendered.
I’m puzzled at this point. We had a story come out many months ago about how Israeli soldiers were supposedly kidnapping Palestinians and returning their dead bodies under cover of darkness stitched up with organs missing. This was never documented. Now suddenly the Guardian has an A-ha! moment talking about an old scandal in which a pathologist is said to have profited from sales of human tissue from various bodies coming through his morgue, the sort of criminal misconduct that’s occurred in other countries (the U.S., Russia and China for example). My question is this: is there anything new and damning in the Guardian story that justifies linking this old case to the Aftonbladet speculations, or is it that some people forgot about or were never aware of the Hiss case, and are now dredging it up in an attempt to revive the Aftonbladet affair?
I find you misstatent of what I actually said–that fully acknowldged that Palestinian deaths from IDF actions were almost certainly included among those on whom Hiss acted–to be disingenuous, in the extreme.
I think that you are conflating two issues and lumping the opinions of different posters inappropriately.
There is one contingent of posters who believe that taking tissue from bodies is sufficiently a good deed that no consent should be required.
(I sympathize with that viewpoint, but I do not agree with it.)
There is a separate contingent of posters who see that a claim that the nation of Israel is deliberately kidnapping and murdering people from a specific segment of society for the purpose of harvesting organs is a rather different claim than that a rogue administrator in a single facility, several years ago, unethically abused his position to make a profit from bodies that passed through his facility from any number of sources of acts of violence or happenstace.
Those two contingents of posters include some overlap, but are not identical.
(There is, of course, a different contingent of posters who wish to conflate the stories for whatever reason. The stories might very well be related to the extent that the vague memory of the one has been transmogrified into the other for propaganda purposes, although I see no reason support such silly attempts at inventing history.)
The arrogance of it. The sheer presumption that society is entitled to dispose of your body as it sees fit, that your wishes and the wishes of your family at the time of your death are irrelevant because someone else has determined that society is entitled to your corpse. It’s well intentioned, but the presumptuousness and the implication that society owns your body is chilling.
And yes, it’s generally considered unethical to perform medical procedures on someone without their consent or the consent of someone acting on their behalf.
Good thing I deleted my “won’t someone please think of the putrefying bacteria” graf.
Well said, Sir.
Truth is a defense to libel/slander. There are prominent groups of Jews who ARE clannish and care about other Jews above all other people. Jewish phone books, Jewish country clubs, Jewish neighborhoods, the list goes on and on, and it’s an open secret that favortism is both shown and expected of Jews for Jews.
I don’t particularly give a shit one way or another, but the Jewish people HAVE deliberately maintained their tribal identity. That, by definition, places tribe above random stranger. Heck, the recent negotiations for the release of one Israeli soldier being swapped for a THOUSAND Palestinian captives clearly indicates that a significant number of people value Israeli lives at something other than a 1-1 ratio over others. This isn’t judgment, it’s simple fact.
There are many Jews who don’t engage in this sort of selection or favortism, but a charge of clannishness or favortism for Jews over non-Jews is based in substantial amounts of fact, and should not be treated as de facto evidence of anti-semitism.
Enjoy,
Steven