UN Rehashes Swedish Organ Harvesting Claim

The UN Human Rights Council website has posted a statement regarding the harvesting of Palestinian organs by Israelis, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing and massacres.”

These rehashed allegations of Israeli organ trafficking are headed by the Libya-founded International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD). According to its website, EAFORD is "focused on the ideological systems of apartheid and Zionism."

Last year, a Swedish daily newspaper, Aftonbladet,published an article claiming that Israeli troops kill Palestinians for their organs in order to sell them on the black market. It has since been cited as “proof” by various other anti-Israel organizations who are making similar allegations.

According to Bostrom, the claims made in his article about the stealing of organs originated from claims made by Palestinian families.

In his article, Bostrom asserted that the Israeli army stole organs from the men it killed during the first Palestinian uprising in 1992. According to the journalist, however, "The article is not accusing the (Israeli) army of snatching organs. The Palestinian families, the Palestine mothers, say that they think or they are sure that someone took organs from their young men."

The article specifically focuses on the case of a 19-year-old Palestinian man named Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, who was killed in a West Bank village by Israeli Defence Forces in 1992. According to his family, the Israel army demanded the equivalent of USD 1,300 for the return of the body.

The Swedish newspaper reported that, according to Ghanem’s mother, “Bilal was returned in a black bag he had no teeth. The body was stitched from the neck all the way down to the abdomen."

When the Israeli soldiers were questioned about it, they said the body had undergone an autopsy. Ghanem’s family, however, maintains that his organs were stolen.

This incident led to at least 20 additional Palestinian families approaching Bostrom, alleging that they suspected Israeli forces had stolen the organs of their sons, as well.

The misleading report has stemmed various global conspiracy theories, of Jewish plots to the harvest organs of victims around the world. Theories have even gone so far as to claim that Israel had arranged to have the organs removed from Haitian earthquake victims. These claims have led to reports in an English-language Palestinian publication, The Palestine Telegraph,regarding organ trafficking allegations.

These conspiracy theories have been reported as fact by Arab and Iranian media, including Press TV, a state-funded Iranian news channel, as well as Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya networks. These have, in turn, spawned various editorial cartoons depicting Israelis as evil slaughterers, happily severing the body parts of Arabs and trading in their organs.

International articles have been generated, as well, in Algeria, claiming Jewish gangs abduct Algerian children for their organs in the Ukraine, accusing Israel of abducting 25,000 Ukrainian children a YouTube video claiming Israeli rescue teams in Haiti may have stolen organs.

These are just a few fallacious claims that have spread internationally like wildfire, ominously reminiscent of blood libel incidents from the Middle Ages, where Jews were accused of using Christian blood with which to bake Passover matzah. Later incarnations of the blood libel include Damascus in 1840, Kiev in 1913, New York in 1928, and Kielce, Poland, in 1946.

Most recently, claims that the Jews harvest the blood and organs of non-Jews have been published and disseminated throughout the media, particularly in Arab or Muslim parts of the world. These claims have even been printed in United Nations documents, according to the National Post, as Iran and Libya, notoriously anti-Israel countries, are leading candidates for election to the UN Human Rights Council.

The Canadian Jewish Congress is among many Jewish organizations expressing outrage regarding the organ harvesting claims. The National Post spoke to Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who said “Not only is there no proof, it is a takeoff of the historical calumny of the Jewish blood libel, and that this is coming out under the auspices of the United Nations, and from an accredited UN organization, is breathtaking in its shame."

Still, EAFORD continues to seek new cases for international action against Israel by focusing on erroneous organ trafficking allegations.