Wrong link for the article on the blood libel against the Chinese; here is the correct one.
Except that Palestinians have been taken into custody, and come back dead and cut up. What has happened to them in the meantime is supposition, yes, but that supposition can only be disproved by an actual investigation into the matter, not a propaganda campaign to smear the person asking the questions.
So if I make some disgraceful shit up about someone based on no evidence, it is now up to them to somehow disprove it? isn’t the onus on the person making the accusation to support it?
The natural explaination - that people who die by violence tend to get autopsied as a matter of policy - is the only “explaination” necessary, unless and until some sort of evidence emerges that actual wrong-doing has occurred. And some angry Palistinians isn’t “evidence”, since they have an obvious animus.
And I think you are mistaking “people being angry” with an organized propaganda campaign.
I think a more reasonable question would be how well supported investigative journalism needs to be. How solid must the information be to turn an article into good journalism?
Lyndon Baines Johnson faced a difficult race in the Texas Senator race in the 1940s. His opponent was a pig farmer. Johnson instructed his aide, “Let’s tell them he has sex with his pigs.” The aide replied, “That’s ridiculous, no one will believe it!”
“No, Son”, replied Johnson, “But let’s make him deny it.”
That’s exactly what’s going on here. Minus the election bit.
What - so publicly respected bodies can’t ever do anything wrong? People you respect can’t commit crimes? I can’t question the actions of the IDF because people respect them? Going by this standard then what of the accusations against the Guards at Gitmo, that seemed fantastical when they were made? They shouldn’t be given any credence at all because the US military is respected by Americans?
We need to further explore this matter of a boycott of Sweden.
The big problem: what is there to boycott? Iron products? Volvos? Bergman movies? Blondes?
Getting people to go along with a boycott of Swedish blondes strikes me as a self-defeating proposition, even if the rest of Scandinavia increases output to keep up with demand. With Bergman movies I doubt there’d be a major impact on the Swedish economy (and trifling even on Netflix). A Volvo boycott might stick (they’re clunky cars with mediocre to bad mileage anyway), but since most auto manufacturers’ sales are in the tank, the effect would be hard to gauge.
Yep, it’s a toughie.
We recently had a lovely discussion in GD in which someone repeatedly brought up stuff about MKULTRA and the Tuskeegee Experiment to justify wild conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination. Never could quite get him to see that the existence of one particular brand of malfeasance does not mean we’ve got to respect nutbar-sounding speculations that are unaccompanied by evidence.
I’m interested in knowing how much evidence is necessary to support an article of this type? I mean, there must be some point where an article is justified without having 100% irrefutable proof, as that is rarely attainable.
I am interested in an answer to that question in a more general case, disregarding the discussed article, which seems to fall below that threshold judging by some people’s opinion here.
What annoys me most about those arguing that these accusations are libel and a vast anti semite conspiracy is that they say that for it to be true, everybody must be fully informed, every doctor, politician and hospital administrator must know what’s going on. That all levels of the military know this and deliberately steal bodies for transplant. I don’t for one second believe such a conspiracy is even remotely possible.
What does fall within the bounds of possibility for me (still not likely, but possible) is that there is maybe one colonel or similiar, with a brother that is a transplant doctor, from time to time this colonel has an injured / dying (but still alive) palestinian, he gives brother a call. Blood work-ups are done and a match is found (maybe, with over 1000 people on waiting list for a kidney how likely is a match?). Palestinian is drugged unconscious and taken to hospital, surgical team, with a history of doing black market (a proven allegation) transplants is assembled.
And there you have it, still a very significant allegation, but nothing like “the whole military and medical apparatus has to be involved”.
The writer has some marginal evidence to support the allegation - would it really be so difficult to do some tests, at least in this one case to prove that the guy is an idjit?
By screaming so loud about blood libels and the like, it seems like people are just trying to avoid any questions, not answer or settle them.
Sweden versus Israel? Gee, it is probably wrong to hope both sides lose.
What do you have against either of us? 
The evidence should be greater than zero, which is where this article falls short.
Well, that’s an easy way of answering the question. But not very useful. Of course I agree that it should be greater than 0, but I think that criteria does not work in a wider sense. I can’t say that I know the answer myself, which is why I asked.
This is my problem with all this as well. Okay, after reading the thread I see that rogue Israeli soldiers and doctors harvesting organs from arrested or injured Palestinians (which is what I’d have guessed had happened if there was a grain of truth in this story; I don’t for one moment believe the Israeli government would approve such an idea) is probably quite impractical given the constraints of organ donations and likely didn’t happen. But as I and others have said upthread, I am certain that some Israeli soldiers did commit atrocities against Palestinians. The idea that pointing out these atrocities when they happen will necessarily cause an outcry from Israelis because the IDF is “the most respected public body in Israel” disturbs me, and I don’t believe that I really understood Alessan correctly there. I’m also disturbed by his comment that Europeans shouldn’t be criticising Israel. Israel’s foreign policy and policy towards Palestinians certainly isn’t perfect, and I think it’s a right, if not a duty, to decry this policy when it violates human rights.
Listen, Alessan, I believe I understand up to a point where you and other Israelis are coming from. It’s frustrating to have your country’s policies constantly criticized by outsiders who don’t know how things really are over here and get the same slanted propaganda, and in your case there’s the added problem of really hostile neighbours who either shoot on you or actively call for your elimination, and, as has been mentioned many times in the thread, the history of antisemitism in Europe. But I believe you’re going a bit overboard in your rhetoric.
I find strawmen annoying. For instance, no one in this thread has claimed that “everybody” and “all levels” “must be fully informed” for such a scheme to succeed. The point I made about transplantation procedures is that you can’t have a viable organ harvesting/transplant program without careful planning and involvement of numerous skilled personnel, utilizing proper facilities. Inevitably considerable numbers of people seeing an unusual concentration of Palestinian 'donors" would know what’s going on - which is where the comparison to Gitmo falls down. As I recall, our knowledge of prisoner abuses at that facility depended heavily on disillusioned Americans blowing the whistle on other Americans. It is less than believable that every Israeli with knowledge of such a scandal would keep quiet. There’ve been leaks and press exposes in Israel over far less.
And no one has theorized “a vast anti-semite conspiracy”. Strawman again. Like it or not, the allegations have much in common with blood libels, others of which persist in modern times from Palestinian and other sources.
In my opinion this does not begin to account for the eagerness with which some people have glommed onto this story. Believing it has far more to do with 1) an opinion that Israel is overwhelmingly evil due to its treatment of Palestinians, therefore pretty much any allegation seems potentially true, and 2) the hope that something nasty like this will stick, thus trampling Israel in the court of public opinion once and for all.
Good luck with that.
Yes, one would think that those flinging about these charges would make at least a token effort to harvest (sorry) some actual evidence before trying to make tabloid hay out of them.
Well there are photos and eyewitness accounts…how much investigation would you like a private citizen to do? How much do you think he can do?
And yes, people have theorised anti semite conspiracy - that’s how this blood libel made its way into the conversation. Before this thread I had never even heard of a blood libel. How much credence I give to the accusation has nothing to do with a blood libel, or some sort of mythical wish to believe that all jews are evil.
OK - here’s a question for you, exactly how many people would need to be complicit to pull this off? According to you its whole transplant teams, hospital administrators and entire IDF units.
I would suggest that the actual numbers are much smaller. For instance, do all the nurses review the documentation or do they simply do what they’re told? IF as a private in the IDF you are told to return a dead prisoner to his family do you ask a lot of questions about where it comes from or do as you’re told?
Your contention is that the claims can’t be true because simply too many people would have to know otherwise. My experience in many different organisations says that a LOT of times the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, and doesn’t question particularly much. Also that it’s not all that difficult to assemble a few people in key positions to pull of unbelievable frauds.
How do you think stuff like enron happens? That the entire team of auditors, all of the accounting staff, and all senior management knew what was going on or that a few key people in a few key positions could subvert and hide information?
Outside of jurisprudence, where laying the burden of proof on the accuser (when used correctly) is a powerful tool for protecting the innocent from miscarriages of justice - not necessarily. This is the territory of the logical fallacy of the burden of proof, which says that the accusing side may be the wrong side to bear the burden in a given argument.
In this case, the logically more incredible argument is that the article is just another brick in the vast wall of a European anti-Semitic conspiracy. Organ harvesting is nowhere near as logically incredible, as it has already been established that it’s happened elsewhere with no connection to Judaism whatsoever. Therefore the burden of proof now lies with the Israeli side of the argument - they need to show either that[ul][li]photos like the one Boström supplied are either fake or misrepresented (i.e. that the corpse in question is not Bilal Ghanan), or[/li][*]that the incisions are in fact only unorthodox methods of obduction and that the organs have not been removed.[/ul]Boström and/or the Palestinians have a much harder task in proving their case - not because it can’t be proven, but because the time, effort, and resources required to do so are beyond their means. To point at this and say “They can’t prove it so it must be false” is intellectually lazy. Disproving it, on the other hand, should be a cakewalk for Israel - that is, if they chose to do so rather than striking up the usual howling chorus of “Anti-Semitism!” Unless, of course, it actually is occurring. But they’ve provided no evidence against this and they have the means to do so. They’re holding 47 cards while Boström’s got a busted low-card flush, but they claim they don’t have four aces. How can they conclusively prove it if they won’t show their hand?
Actually I’d say it is probably impossible to disprove. A very common practise of conspiracy theorists is to enlarge the circle of the conspiracy to include anyone reacting negatively to the conspiracy or who try to disprove it. Case in point: The NIST report is widely seen as a conspiracy cover up by 9/11 truthers. If Israel were to put some documents on the table to disprove the “organers”. They would simply be look upon as another layer of the cover up.
In any case, the purpose was never to prove Israel engaged in organ stealing. It is a classic smear campaign. Regardless of the absurdity of the accusations, it will reinforce the people whom already subscribe to such theories about Israel, and it will settle as a sligt distrust in the subconsciousness of many other people who read it in passing.
In any case I think Israel have more pressing theories to disprove!.
btw. Aftonposten has written a follow article today.
Wouldn’t a sex-drive decreasing gum be a better long-term solution?
I need a lot more suspension of disbelief to swallow that one.
Link? Or is it only in the written paper?