Blood Libel and ‘Peace’ — A Bad Middle Eastern Mix
Obama pushes Netanyahu for more concessions while the Arab media slanders Israelis as organ thieves.
Once again, the usual discord. On the one hand, U.S. envoy George Mitchell is in Israel to try — once again — to drum up Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that in President Obama’s vision are supposed to blossom, and in a rather short time, into an overall Arab-Israeli peace. On the other hand, the latest hit in the region is Jews as murderous organ harvesters.
A story first offered by Algeria’s al-Khabar daily — and now spreading like wildfire, the Jerusalem Post reports, in “the anti-Semitic blogosphere and many Arab and Muslim media outlets,” notably including Iran’s official Press TV agency — claims that:
Bands of Moroccans and Algerians have … been roaming the streets of Algeria’s cities kidnapping young children, who are then transported across the border into Morocco. From the Moroccan city of Oujda, the children are then purportedly sold to Israelis and American Jews, who then harvest their organs for sale in Israel and the United States. The organs are said to fetch anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000.
Although the al-Khabar story (Google something like “Algeria Morocco organs Jews” to see how popular it is) is reticent on the ultimate fate of the alleged kidnapped children, a similar report a month ago in Sweden’s Aftonbladet offered gruesome details, claiming that during a 1992 Israeli “campaign aimed at having the … public register for postmortal organ donation … young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.”
In this now-famous case, the Israeli government protested vigorously to the Swedish authorities — who refused even to publicly criticize the article and its author, Donald Boström. Meaning that if even “enlightened” Sweden regards this latest variant of the archetypal anti-Jewish blood libel as a valid point of view, worthy of wide dissemination in a large daily like Aftonbladet, its growing currency in Arab and Muslim media is hardly surprising.
Indeed, both the Aftonbladet and al-Khabar reports make much of the actual case of Rabbi Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, arrested in July on charges of, as the New York Times put it, “enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000.” In the Swedish or Algerian or Iranian fever swamps, this alleged corruption gets easily transmogrified into grisly Israeli and Jewish murder-for-profit activities.
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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/
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7 Comments
1. arhooley:“we have been granted an unparalleled honor — to dominate the world, by means of capital, knowledge, politics, by means of killing, or any other ploy.”
My eye lit on that sentence and I had to read back to see whether it was a purported Jewish statement or a straightforward Arab statement.
Sep 17, 2009 - 12:47 am 2. Paul -Indiana:Is there any question about Obama’s priorities?
Sep 17, 2009 - 5:07 am 3. Joel:Yes, the contradiction, the hypocrisy, is there and it’s glaring. Those determined not to see it, or who don’t really care about it, aren’t going to change, but good to shine the light on it anyway.
Sep 17, 2009 - 6:49 am 4. David W. Lincoln:When truth and freedom are at odds, which describes the portion of the Arab street which follows the deformed souls of Nasrallah, Ahmadinezhad, and their ilk; real peace is not attainable.
But when Arabs follow Sheik al-Hoziel, as described here, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277926716&pagename =JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull , as well as Nonie Darwish, Bat Yeor, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat
Sep 17, 2009 - 12:25 pm 5. David W. Lincoln:and those who prioritize life the way they do, a far different scenario arises. Which is far more preferable to what the deformed souls deliver.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277926716&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
should be the link, instead of what I posted before.
Sep 17, 2009 - 3:24 pm 6. Leatherneck:This world system hates Jews. Don’t you folks know that by now? The Jews brought morality to the world from Noah to Moses.
Those who rule this world system want to be as G-d. The oldest lie in the Bible. They do not want morality, and the fact that Israel exists again shows G-d will do as he stated.
Those who try, and divide Israel will be divided. Those who curse Israel will be cursed. G-d will not be mocked.
What I just wrote is hate speech in the New World Order of the Ages. As a Christian, I am not welcome in the New Age. All false religion are welcome, and that includes believers in allah. Just ask the UN, and Lucis Trust.
Sep 17, 2009 - 3:51 pm 7. Eliyahu:Could the arabs be projecting??
I remember reading during the Lebanon war in 1982, that in a PLO controlled medical clinic in southern Lebanon, a few young men were found hanging on meat hooks with tubes draining their blood into containers. The young men were supposed to be local Shiites who had somehow fallen afoul of the PLO which ruled the area at the time.
I haven’t seen any further discussion of this since then.
Sep 17, 2009 - 4:22 pm