Harvesting organs for guys killed by M-16s on the street…the Israelis DO have the best doctors.
I think Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has totally gone and Godwinized the whole thing:
Okay, so he didn’t actually mention Hitler or Nazis, but you see where he was going…
Please elaborate.
He’s trying to draw some sort of equivalency between the Swedish government not denouncing a newspaper article (presumably of dubious accuracy) last week, and the Swedish government not declaring war on Germany 50 years ago.
[ol]
[li]Israel isn’t making any death threats.[/li][li]The cartoon debacle was manufactured by the supposed “victims”, who added their own, worse caricatures to rile up the mob.[/li][li]The creation of obvious works of fiction isn’t comparable to claiming that real, living people are murdering innocent civilians and harvesting their organs.[/li][li]Only an insane fanatic would see the Mohammad cartoons as justification to hurt anyone. Someone might hear this claim and believe it, and thus conclude that Israel’s (fabricated) atrocities need to be stopped.[/li][/ol]
What an authoritative conclusion. Nobody saw any incisions, whether autopsy-related or nefarious organ harvesting-related and the supposed dampness of the burial shroud is not futher characterized. It should be noted that the sutured incisions of dead people do not gush fluid so as to get outer garments/body coverings wet (I speak as a pathologist from personal knowledge of bodies with closed, large autopsy incisions).
If it’s so routine, why then stage an elaborate method of returning bodies under cover of darkness in a way calculated to draw attention? Them Israelis must be really stoopid.
Oh no…no direct accusations for our boy. None at all.
Do you really think it’s the obligation of the Israelis to prove a negative? If you make wild-sounding claims, it’s your obligation to prove them, not to sound like Michael Moore trying to connect-the-dots while on crack.
For the benefit of Henrichek and any others who may not be familiar with them, there are numerous urban legends that have circulated in this country and elsewhere, concerning people who supposedly been lured into situations where they were drugged, organs (typically a kidney) harvested, and later woke up with a freshly sutured incision (in one story, coming to in a bathtub covered with ice). Americans and Europeans have also been accused of killing for transplant organs (see this link for more (stories spread in Guatemala in the '90s about how foreigners were allegedly kidnapping and killing children to procure organs, and mobs brutally attacked some foreigners as a result). Sinister kidnapping schemes for organ harvesting seems to be a theme that rings true among credulous people with built-in prejudices against a group, aided in the current case by lingering fondness for anti-Semitic blood libel stories. I’m not surprised the Israelis are pissed off.
On a more practical basis, the current allegation suffers from a major defect - there’d have to be a large number of people involved in a conspiracy, from soldiers to doctors to hospital staff, all of whom would have to keep their mouths shut (not likely in a country where there have been considerable leaks over far less explosive stuff) - and removing organs for transplantation is a sophisticated procedure requiring expert assessment, experienced personnel and a modern well-equipped facility. You can’t very well “disappear” Palestinians off the street on the off-chance that they have healthy organs compatible for transplantation by blood type and histocompatibility antigens, and accomplish the safe removal in some army barracks or field clinic.
This whole thing sounds like garbage from someone with an ax to grind, a major screw loose or both.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I’d like to help clarify what the author actually says in the section about the body being cut open or not.
There is a picture in the original article of what is supposedly Bilal Ahmed Ganan’s body, if you click on Olentzero’s link. http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
Here’s the section where the text deals with the incident (fourth paragraph from the end):
Literal translation:
When Bilal is put (sic) in the grave his chest was exposed, and it was suddenly clear to the few people present what abuse he had been subjected to. Bilal was far from the first who had been buried cut open from belly to throat, and speculations about the purpose took off.
It was a little more than simply not declaring war. Swedish neutrality wasn’t that of the pacifist, it was that of the pimp. Germany had permission to transport troops through Sweden to Norway for several years during the war. While I believe those are good grounds for criticism of Swedish wartime policy, and given that Sweden accepted 8,000 Danish Jews in an effort to rescue them from the concentration camps, Israel’s flinging this criticism in Sweden’s face over a newspaper article is unjustifiable.
Take a real good look at that link. There’s a photo of Bilal taken by the author of the article there.
It is at this point that I have to point out a serious error in my own translation. Here is the original sentence:
I completely mistranslated ‘blottades’, which I confused with the Swedish word blött, meaning wet or moist. The verb blotta means to uncover or expose, so the correct translation should be “When Bilal was lowered into the grave his chest was uncovered, and suddenly it became clear…”
This will teach me to double check my Norstedt’s! (ETA: Curse you and thank you simultaneously, Walpurgis 
)
Heavy military escort under lockdown and enforced blackout don’t exactly tell people “Hey, you should come over here and check this out”, especially when they already know that the presence of Israeli troops even in broad daylight probably spells trouble.
If the Israelis in fact aren’t doing anything like this, it’s their obligation to lay the facts out for public scrutiny and discussion, not sound like hysterical paranoiacs flinging wild accusations of rabid nationwide anti-Semitism using 60-year-old history.
Translated directly from the article:
The DN article mentions this same conference and mentions that the exact same information about lack of condemnation by physicians and punishment of physicians involved was reported in Ha’aretz. I ask in all seriousness: Was there this level of outrage from Israel against DN or the Swedish government over the earlier article? What about outrage against Ha’aretz? I ask in all snarkiness, would the Israeli government have demanded an apology from themselves in the latter case?
It could very well be garbage, but the evidence being collected doesn’t point in that direction. Nonetheless, if it is in fact total garbage, the current approach by the Israeli government is doing nothing to establish that fact. In fact, I’d venture to say that the response is more full of wild and irrelevant accusations than the original article.
What facts can they possibly present to defend themselves from this accusation? “Here are the journals that do not mention harvesting organs from Palestinians?” “Here is the report from the commanding officer, which does not mention harvesting organs from Palestinians?” “Here are the people who did not receive Palestinian organs?”
Wouldn’t people just accuse them of doctoring the records to hide the truth?
If their organ transplant program were on the same level as the rest of the Western world, they’d probably have incontrovertible documentation all along the line, from original donor through transport to operation, including documentation on blood type and histological compatibility. Y’know, things that other medical experts from outside the country could look at and pronounce genuine. The rest of us would therefore be able to relegate claims of doctoring and obfuscation to the same areas of our brain that are concerned with Obama’s birth certificate and what happened to the Pentagon on September 11.
As it is, since there seems to be an established routine of illegal organ trading (with an accompanying lack of firm documentation) and backhanded condoning by various administrations, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of facts Israel could present to defend themselves from this accusation. If they haven’t documented where their organs came from in the first place because doing so would expose them to international condemnation, then there’s no way to prove that further accusations with some evidence to back them up are baseless. Much easier to point fingers and scream “Anti-Semitism! Holocaust enablers!”
And why criticize Sweden? It was the smartest thing they ever did.
Back to the OP I am shock at the statistics of ilegal transplants in Israel. I am a lawyer of one of Argentina´s best known transplant clinics and here - I repeat Argentina -, I’ve never heard of things like this: there is a centralized system, every organ is controlled in all steps of the process, there are waiting list, etc.
If those statistics are true then the article allegations pale in comparison.
Somehow, I think they are wrong.
New developments (sorry, in Swedish, haven’t found an English equivalent yet): http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/israel-i-storoffensiv-mot-sverige-1.936641. This is from a more well regarded newspaper than Aftonbladet :).
Rough translation (far from perfect, but I’m in a hurry):
What is:
We got a Jewish FBI agent? 
Perhpas a reference to the Rabbis accused of illegal organ handling in the US?
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum taken away by FBI agents. Rosenbaum believed to have operated as a middleman in the illegal organ commerce.
Thanks!
Netanyahu to Sweden: Condemn IDF organ harvesting article
So this is now a “diplomatic crisis” :rolleyes:.
The response from our Prime and Foreign ministers seems to be that they won’t give in to the Israeli demands.
Our Foreign Minister appears to have been reported by the Social Democrats to our Committee of the Constitution, which monitors the government’s work and makes sure they comply with the rules regulating their behavior, on grounds that their statements so far might already have run afoul of Chapter 1 of the Freedom of the Press Act of our constitution (official English translations).
So it seems like Netanyahu is asking for something that is even constitutionally forbidden in Sweden.
The photo of the person said to be Bilal shows a closed incision that does not appear typical of either autopsy incisions (typically Y or U-shaped) or of incisions made to remove organs such as kidneys (I have seen examples of such). Apart from the question of authenticity (if the Israelis are supposedly instituting blackouts and returning bodies secretly under army guard, how did this photo get taken and revealed?) it’s impossible to tell why the body was cut open (for embalming? Medical treatment?) or by whom.
If the Palestinians had custody of the body surely a doctor could have determined if the organs were intact, or if any had been removed professionally as for transplantation (when organs are removed for autopsy study the process is far less elegant than when they need to be preserved for transplantation). And I really, really doubt that all these graves of supposedly “disappeared” Palestinians have been sealed in concrete or something and placed under guard so that no forensic post-mortems can be done. Any Palestinians making these charges have only to get a team of expert forensic pathologists in (I can think of several who’d love the publicity) and they could prove/disprove the claims.
But it’s apparently much easier to play to conspiracy theorists and the sleaziest elements of the tabloid press.
How long into the decomposition process (which probably varies because of various factors) is it possible to determine whether all organs are present?
These are very good points, worth following up on. I might try contacting Boström, see if I can’t get at least an answer as to how he got the photo in the first place.
From the description of the burial, it really sounds like the Palestinians never had custody of the body - the soldiers came in with Bilal’s corpse, switched the hospital gown he was still wearing with a burial shroud, grabbed a couple of his relatives to dig the grave and mix the cement, and stood by while the work was finished. There was no opportunity for Bilal’s family to go get a doctor, nor does it seem like there was any opportunity to plan ahead for such a contingency during the five days Bilal was missing.
Argument from personal incredulity. Here’s a link from The Australian and one from Reuters that specifically mention the use of cement in gravedigging within the occupied territory of Gaza. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that burials of any Palestinians, disappeared or not, regularly involve cement. Neither I nor the article made any claims about the graves being put under guard after the burial, either.
Honestly, the way these burials seem to be conducted, the family would have to be lucky enough to have a doctor in the right place at the right time and manage to get him past the Israeli troops watching over the process.
Just as it is apparently much easier to cry “Anti-Semitism!” and create a diplomatic incident with a government that has no control or input into the situation instead of openly addressing the question and disproving it. Not that I don’t believe it could be done, but again - given the murky background of the Israeli organ transplant trade to begin with, it just doesn’t seem Israel’s going to be able to do it.