Israel
Asper Letter 01 10-May-2002 They left their hearts in Tel Aviv
"The family
of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an
Israeli jail, was forced to bring suit for the return of missing
body parts."
— Jonathan Rosenblum
Israel Asper
Executive Chairman
CanWest Global Communications Corp.
3100 TD Centre, 201 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg MB R3B 3L7
Israel Asper:
In one of your newspapers, The Windsor Star of 09-Apr-2002,
p. C10, I read that your father, Leon, was a violinist trained at
the Odessa Conservatory and your mother, Cecilia, was a concert
pianist. Your parents seem to have managed their
accomplishments in Ukraine in the face of what writer Zev Singer
would have us believe was an adverse environment: "Escaping the
pogroms of their native Ukraine, Cecilia and Leon Asper came to
Canada in the early 1920s."
In order to avoid giving the impression that you are using your
newspaper empire to keep alive the nurtured hatreds and hyperbolized
grievances of your ancestors, I wonder if you could not introduce
some balance to your coverage of Ukrainian-Jewish relations?
Was a
Ukrainian Murdered That A Jew Might Live?
For example, a story that is both more recent and more urgent than
that of your parents escaping Ukrainian "pogroms," and perhaps more
credible as well, and one which I don't think you have permitted
your newspaper empire to allude to as yet, is the following:
UKRAINIAN ECHO 07 January
2002 Page 22
A view of the press in Ukraine
KHMELNYTSKY
"Returned from foreign labor ... without his heart."
Underneath such a headline, this newspaper relates that,
reduced to despair by extreme material straits, a
39-year-old Khmelnytsky resident took a job in Israel.
However, the terrible news shortly arrived that he had died
there of poisoning by a tainted alcoholic beverage (even
though all domestic sources insist that he never drank!).
The body of the unfortunate worker was returned to Ukraine
for burial. However, medical experts discovered that he was
missing ... his heart! At the moment, this
dreadfully-inhuman affair is being investigated with the
help of Interpol.... (Ukrinform, 23 November).
|
Maybe
Ukrainians Are Just Creating An Urban Legend?
There are those who seem ready to disbelieve all reports of organ
robbery, and who thus would likely consider the above story of organ
robbery, perhaps preceded by murder as well, as an "urban legend,"
as at
However,
acknowledging that some organ-robbery stories are likely to be urban
legends nevertheless leaves open several possibilities:
- quite simply, that other organ-robbery stories are true;
- that anyone interested in discrediting the true stories
might do so by broadly disseminating false ones;
- that one way of creating an urban legend is to label a true
story an "urban legend."
I touch below on
several reasons for thinking that the above story of a Jewish organ
robbery of a Ukrainian may be true.
Was a
Scotsman Murdered That A Jew Might Live?
The highly similar fate of Scottish tourist Alastair Sinclair does
seem credible:
Moreover, [Jerusalem District Court Judge
Ruth] Orr was well within her rights to be skeptical
of the pathological findings of
[government pathologist Dr. Yehuda] Hiss, who has
long been the subject of controversy as director of Israel
Institute for Forensic Medicine, at Abu Kabir. Last
November, a local Tel Aviv paper Ha'ir ran a 12-page
expose of Abu Kabir and revealed how the national lab allows
medical students to practice on bodies sent there for
autopsies, and transfers body parts for transplants without
permission from the family of the deceased.
The family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who
hanged himself in an Israeli jail, was forced to bring suit
for the return of missing body parts.
University of Glasgow pathologists who did an autopsy at the
request of Sinclair's family, found that it had been
returned without a heart (which they suspect was used for a
transplant) and without the crucial bone needed to confirm
the claim that he died from hanging.
Jonathan
Rosenblum, Presumed Guilty, Dei'ah veDibur,
07-Feb-2001, originally published in the Jerusalem Post,
currently available at
www.shemayisrael.com/chareidi/archives5761/beshalach/features.htm
|
And because it appears plausible that Alastair Sinclair did not hang
himself but was murdered, and because it also appears plausible that
the motive for the murder was the harvesting of Alastair Sinclair's
heart, the similarity to the Ukrainian story invites us to upgrade
the plausibility of the latter at the same time — which is to say,
to upgrade the Ukrainian story from possible urban legend to
possible murder followed by organ harvesting.
Three
Palestinian Teenagers Murdered by Born-to-Kill Jews, then Stripped
of Organs
The sinister
name of Abu Kabir (the Israel Institute for Forensic Medicine
mentioned just above) comes to our notice once again in the story of
Palestinian teenagers being the targets of Jewish murder and organ
robbery, published on 09-Jan-2002, just two days after the Ukrainian
story above:
Israel Kills Palestinian Boys, Steals
Organs For Transplants
Teheran Times.com
1-9-2
AL-KHALIL (IRNA) — The Zionist state has tacitly
admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at
Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three
Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army
nearly ten days ago.
Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to
a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament
'Knesset', Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn't deny
that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the
Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific
research.
"I couldn't say for sure that something like that (taking
out the organs) didn't happen."
Teibi said he had received credible evidence proving that
Israeli doctors at the forensic institute extracted such
vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the
bodies of Palestinian youths and children killed by the
Israeli Army in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Israeli authorities normally detain the bodies of
martyred Palestinians for a few days without any
explanation.
The Israeli Army on December 30 killed three Palestinian
boys, aged 14-15 near Khan Younis in unclear circumstances.
The army issued conflicting reports on the killing, while
Palestinian sources charged that Israeli troops murdered the
three unarmed boys in cold blood.
The bodies of the three boys were handed over to the
Palestinians for burial on 6 January.
However, shortly before burial, Palestinian medical
authorities examined the bodies and found out that the main
vital organs were missing from the bodies.
The Israeli media have nearly completely ignored the affair.
(IRNA)
Reproduced on the Jeff Rense web site at
www.rense.com/general19/israelkills.htm
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Photographs
Need to be Explained
|
|
Below are two photographs out
of several available that lend credibility to the above
charges — supposedly Palestinians whose organs have been
harvested by Jews. If the lengthy central incision has
some explanation other than organ harvesting, then negative
speculation could be diminished by re-publishing the
photographs along with that alternative explanation.
For example, perhaps such an incision results from a
standard autopsy, in which case it should be explained why
an autopsy is performed in a case where the victim has
undergone such massive damage that the cause of death is not
in question: |
www.ummah.com/inewsletter/massacres/palestine/index14.htm
An Organ
Robbery in Beersheba
The conjecture of Jews harvesting Palestinian organs is further
strengthened by the Jewish admission below (of a case in which it
might be assumed that if a victim of a traffic accident in Israel
cannot be identified, then that victim is more likely to have been
Palestinian than Jewish):
Interestingly, the Israeli Anatomy and Pathology Law (1953)
allows for "using part of a corpse when it is needed to save
the life of a person" without any consent. This law has
very rarely been used and on one celebrated occasion may
have brought more damage than benefit. On June 19, 1993, a
heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys were harvested from an
anonymous traffic accident victim in Beersheba and
transplanted in five patients in Israel. After all attempts
to identify the family failed, the hospital staff harvested
the organs without consent. This person was not carrying a
donor card. The story was described on the front pages of
the daily newspapers as a case of "organ robbery," and
public response was so unfavorable that no similar attempts
have been made since.
Ethical Issues in Organ Transplantation in Israel by
Gershon B. Grunfeld, Ph.D., Bruce Rappaport Faculty of
Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, P.O.B.
9649, 31096 Haifa, ISRAEL, on University of Tsukuba web site
at
www.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/EJ66/EJ66O.html
|
Seven-Year-Old Palestinian Boy Murdered by Born-To-Kill Jews, then
Stripped of Organs
That Jews
allocated expensive resources to save "Israeli-Arab teenagers" is
one detail that does not ring true below, and if true in this one
instance, might have been implemented so as to justify and
strengthen the precedent of harvesting Palestinian organs, but with
the intention of channeling later supply to Jews — a hypothesis that
could be evaluated by an examination of the number of organs that
Israel has been allocating to Jews and Arabs respectively, should
such data ever be released. A question called to mind by the
discussion of the influence of Jewish religion on organ
transplanting policy at the bottom of the present letter is whether
in the entire history of Israel, a Jewish organ has ever been
transplanted into a non-Jew.
Furthermore, the above claim of a Ukrainian victim of Jewish organ
harvesting is considerably reinforced by the admission below that
Gastarbeiter (foreign worker) donors constitute nearly half of
all donors, with the claim that family permission for organ
harvesting is obtained (in all cases, apparently) being a second
detail that does not quite ring true. Certainly permission
being granted "by telephone" carries an air of informality, and
places an obstacle in the path of any investigator attempting to
verify that family permission had in fact been given. Finally,
it must be kept in mind that the bulk of Jewish transplants are
conducted outside of Israel, as will be documented in the next
section; the small numbers cited in the box quote immediately below
fail to convey the volume of activity:
During
the first ten months of the year, 26 donors contributed to
91 recipients. The donors included traffic-accident
fatalities, operating-room deaths, and seven-year-old Ali
Jawarish of Bethlehem, accidentally shot by IDF soldiers
during riots outside Rachel’s Tomb. He was pronounced
brain-dead on Nov. 15; his organs were transplanted into
three Israeli-Arab teenagers the next day. Nearly half the
donors during the first six months of 1997 were
gastarbeiter whose families overseas gave their consent
by telephone — sometimes in return for Health Ministry
funding to fly the corpse home.
Organ
Transplants and Donations, ISRAEL YEARBOOK and ALMANAC, 1998
www.iyba.co.il/98/organs.htm
|
That deaths among Gastarbeiter are so commonplace, and
Gastarbeiter family permission to harvest organs is so
dependable, that Gastarbeiter constitute nearly half of all
organ donors is a claim that cries out for investigation — the
suspicion being aroused that Jews murder Gastarbeiter in
order to harvest their organs, and fall short of Western standards
as to what constitutes obtaining family permission as well.
Jews obtaining organs that may be worth millions of dollars for no
more than the cost of flying what remains of a Gastarbeiter
body back home sounds like a good deal as well.
Israel Is
Deep Into Organ Trafficking
As one cannot always rob, one sometimes is reduced to purchasing:
Israel
has recently become something of a pariah in the transplant
world. Without a strong culture of organ donation and under
the pressure of angry transplant candidates, the Ministry of
Health has refused to crack down on the country’s
multi-million dollar business in transplant tourism that
arranges junkets from dialysis clinics in Jerusalem and Tel
Aviv to medical centres in Europe and the United States.
"Why should we Israelis be made to travel to third world
clinics to get the kidneys we need to survive from the
bodies of peasants, soldiers, or guest workers who may be in
worse physical shape than ourselves?" a 71-year-old "kidney
buyer" from Tel Aviv asked me rhetorically. "Organs should
be seen as a human, not as a national resource." It was
good to see "Avirham," an elderly gentleman, alive and happy
with his revitalizing 22-year-old "peasant" kidney. And his
living donor? "A peasant, without anything!" he replied.
"Do you have any idea what $1,000, let alone $5,000 means in
the life of a peasant?"
For most bio-ethicists, the "slippery slope" in transplant
medicine begins with the emergence of a black market in
organs and tissue sales. For the anthropologist, it emerges
much earlier: the first time a frail and ailing human looks
at another living person and realizes that inside that other
body is something that can prolong his or her life. The
desire is articulated: "I want that; I need that even more
than you." In terms of transplants, the kidney has emerged
as the ultimate fetish, promising to satisfy the most basic
of human desires — that for life, vitality and élan.
The sale of human organs and tissues requires that certain
disadvantaged individuals and populations have been reduced
to the role of "suppliers." It is a scenario in which
bodies are dismembered, transported, processed and sold in
the interests of a more socially advantaged population of
organ and tissue receivers. I use the word "fetish"
advisedly to conjure up the displaced magical energy that is
invested in the strangely animate kidney. Avirham, who flew
from Jerusalem to Georgia for his kidney, explained why he
would never tolerate a donation from a corpse: "That kidney
is practically dead. It was probably pinned down under the
wheels of a car for several hours... I was able to see my
donor. He was young, healthy, strong. Just what I was
hoping for."
Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, The Organ of Last Resort, UNESCO, The
Courier, July/August 2001
www.unesco.org/courier/2001_07/uk/doss34.htm
|
Award-winning investigative journalism in Turkey uncovers Jewish
plundering of Turkish organs:
| Ugur
Dündar, Haluk Sahin, and M. Ali Önel of Kanal D's ARENA,
Hürriyet Production, Turkey
"The
International Transplant Mafia," broadcast in two
installments in 1997, exposed a human organ black-market
network linking Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Israel.
An Istanbul man, struggling to raise two young children, had
agreed to sell one of his kidneys for $8,000 U.S. dollars
but later contacted Arena, Turkey's lead
investigative TV program, fearing that more than a kidney
might be lost. An Arena reporter with a hidden
camera,
| "I had
to do something, you know, to save the kids. That
meant I had to give a part of body. God help anyone
from making such a decision. It was awful." —
Ramazan, 27-year-old father of two, Arena
|
posing
as the donor's friend, accompanied him over the next several
days to meetings with organ brokers and a Turkish surgeon.
The operation was aborted at the last minute, when the
Arena crew entered the hospital, cameras rolling.
The surgeon was denounced by the country's medical board and
was later tried, but Arena discovered another
syndicate operating several months later in another city.
This time posing as the donor, an Arena reporter met
with an organ broker and agreed to sell his kidney for
$5,000. A trip to the Czech Republic for the operation
fell apart after Arena alerted police. The man
confessed he was paid to arrange kidney transplants by his
boss in Israel, where Arena reporters later
unsuccessfully searched for the syndicate boss.
Instead, they found the president of an association of
patients waiting for kidney transplants, who said 50
Israelis had been saved in the last year by Turkish kidneys.
1998
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
Award Finalists
www.icij.org/about/finalists.html
|
Americans may "harbor a deep reluctance" to purchase a poor man's
kidney, but Israeli dialysis patient Moshe Tati isn't stricken by
the same qualms:
For Sale, Used Kidneys: Buyer Beware
Michael Finkel © The New York Times Magazine Thursday, May
31, 2001
[...]
Mr. Tati was 43 years old, he was dying and not one of his
family members was a suitable match for a kidney donation.
So he called a broker.
Mr. Tati lives in Israel, which happens to be one of the
more active nations in the international organ-trafficking
market. The market, which is completely illegal, is so
complex and well-organized that a single transaction often
crosses three continents: a broker from Los Angeles, say,
matches an Italian with kidney failure to a seller in
Jordan, for surgery in Turkey. [...]
But the sale of human organs, whether from a living person
or a cadaver, is against the law in virtually every country
(Iran is perhaps the only exception) and has been condemned
by all of the world's medical associations. Yet, in Israel
and a handful of other nations, including India, Turkey,
China, Russia and Iraq, organ sales are conducted with only
a scant nod toward secrecy. Paying for an organ has become
so routine in Israel that there have been instances in which
a patient has elected not to accept the offer of a kidney
donation from a well-matched relative. "Why risk harm to a
family member?" one patient remarked. Instead, these
patients have decided that purchasing a kidney from someone
they have never met — in almost all cases someone who is
impoverished and living in a foreign land — is a far more
acceptable option. American dialysis patients have been
significantly less eager than Israelis to enter the kidney
market. Most Americans, it seems, harbor a deep reluctance
to engage in such medical procedures, even though they are
being done overseas. [...]
It was only after he was aboard a chartered plane at
Ben-Gurion International Airport that Mr. Tati and three
other kidney patients learned they would be going to
Turkey. The surgery to remove the seller's kidney, Mr. Tati
says, was performed by a Turkish team; the transplant
surgery was completed by an Israeli physician and nurses who
had flown with them. As Mr. Tati awoke from his transplant
surgery, the Israeli doctor was at his bedside, grinning.
"He told me, 'Congratulations, everything's great,'" Mr.
Tati said.
OODr.com
www.00dr.com/article.php3?id_article=59
|
Although I have not found evidence of children being trafficked for
their organs, suspicions have been raised in the case of Brazil, and
alarm in the case of Romania, below:
In all,
the organ stealing rumor has its basis in poor peoples'
perceptions, grounded in a social and bio-medical reality,
that their bodies and those of their children might be worth
more dead than alive to the rich and the powerful. They can
all too easily imagine that their bodies, and the
bodies of their young children, may be eyed longingly by
those with money. As they envision it, organ exchange
proceeds from the bodies of the young, the poor and the
beautiful to the bodies of the old, the rich, and the ugly,
and from the poor in the South to the rich in the North:
Americans, Germans, Italians, Japanese and Israelis in
particular. [...]
Finally, the child and organ stealing rumor reflects
unscrupulous practices of international adoption. In the
shantytowns of Brazil I encountered several cases of coerced
adoption and (in 1990 alone) two cases of child stealing by
wealthy "patrons." Each year nearly 1,500 children leave
Brazil, legally, to live with adoptive parents in Europe,
the United States, and Israel. But if one adds the
clandestine traffic in babies that relies on false documents
and bureaucratic corruption in Brazil and abroad, exploiting
the ignorance and the powerlessness of poor women, the
number of children leaving Brazil has been estimated at
3,000 a year, or roughly 50 babies a week.
The lively market in "spare babies" for international
adoption is often confused with the lively market in "spare
parts" for international transplant surgery. As poor people
in shantytowns see it, the ring of organ exchange proceeds
from the bodies of the young, the poor, and the beautiful to
the bodies of the old, the rich, and the ugly, and from poor
nations in the South to rich nations in the North. In the
midst of the black market for organs and babies, poor people
can hardly be blamed for thinking that their babies are
wanted as much dead and for their organs as or their lives.
[...]
Between 1985-1990 about 2,000 children have entered Israel
from Brazil in a questionable manner.
Nancy
Scheper-Hughes
sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/organswatch/pages/theftoflife2.html
(footnote numbers removed)
|
Romania probes Israeli adoption agency
link in organ trafficking
By Ran Reznick
Romanian authorities are looking into possible links between
Israeli adoption agencies and an illegal global conspiracy
to sell organs for transplants.
The Romanian Embassy in Israel has asked for, and received
from the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, a list of all
children born in Romania who have been brought to Israel for
adoption in recent years. The Romanian officials are trying
to ascertain if all such children arrived in Israel with all
organs in their bodies. [...]
Responding to complaints and rumors, Romanian authorities
have taken the highly unusual step in the past year of
withholding authorization for the adoption of 16 Romanian
babies destined for Israeli parents. This delay has been
enforced although the Israeli couples have paid $20,000 each
to adopt the infants, and have already become acquainted
with the babies in the foster homes and institutions where
they are being held. Romanian authorities insist they will
not give the go ahead for the adoptions until inquiries
about possible wrong-doing are completed.
Ha'aretz, 12-Dec-2001
www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=105107&sw=Romania
|
The BBC report below includes description of a young Moldovan
engineer who had a kidney stolen in Turkey, possibly for Jewish use,
in gruesome, urban-legend manner:
MOLDOVA/TURKEY/ISRAEL — ORGAN TRADE
Reporter: Sue Lloyd Roberts (BBC)
LEAD STORY
EPISODE 5
SERIES 11 - 01-Aug-2001
Synopsis:
The Moldovan village of Minghia has the dubious distinction
of being the world's best source of human kidneys. At least
14 young men from the village have sold one of their kidneys
in an extensive trade across three countries. In an
extraordinary investigation the BBC's Sue Lloyd Roberts even
discovers one case of a young engineer who had his kidney
stolen. Lured to Istanbul on the promise of work, he was
told the job had evaporated but he could earn his return
fare by selling blood. When he woke from the anaesthetic he
had a major scar and an empty feeling in his left side. He
was told he could either accept the $3000 for his kidney
(the going rate for Moldovan kidneys) or find his own way
out of the predicament.
"I was furious, it was a fait accompli" Sergei Timms
In Turkey, Sue discovers that the surgeon responsible for
the illegal trade is well known to the authorities, having
been repeatedly exposed on Turkish TV, but seems to be
continuing his trade with impunity. Most of the recipients
of the kidneys are Israelis because of the very low level of
[organ] donations there. From the
health authorities in Israel we learn that the practice is
now so widespread that insurance companies, subsidised by
the Government, are funding these illegal transplants. It's
a shocking indictment of the ways supply and demand can
distort the law and ethics. For poor Moldovan villagers
$3,000 may be their only chance of a reasonable future, for
Israelis on dialysis $60,000 is a cheap price to get back
their lives. Meanwhile fortunes are being made by agents,
middlemen and surgeons feeding this demand. The organ trade
is illegal in all three countries but the police and health
authorities are either unwilling or unable to combat the
pressures of these disturbing market realities.
Australia Broadcasting Corporation Online, 01-Aug-2001
www.abc.net.au/foreign/2001/ep5-11.htm
|
Jewish
Fundamentalists Give A Green Light
The passage
quoted below discloses: (1) what is perhaps the main reason that
Israel has a low rate of organ donations, and (2) that some Jewish
thinking condones murder for any of several purposes, among which is
the harvesting of non-Jewish organs for use by Jews.
In view of the information in the present letter, and particularly
in the quotation below, it may be wondered what inhibitions the
Jewish soldiers pictured here might feel about delivering the
Palestinians that they seize to an organ-harvesting facility, or
what finders fees they may be paid for doing so.
Also of interest would be to see photographs of the people
sacrificed for their organs juxtaposed with photographs of those who
receive those organs.
In 1994
Rabbi [Yehoshua] Sheinberger
[...] met with senior physicians
from the Israel Transplants Association and discussed with
them the Jewish religious prohibition on organ donations.
In Israel Haredi Jews refuse organ transplants from their
and/or their relatives' corpses. On this issue the Haredi
position influences many people for superstitious as well as
religious reasons. Organ transplants in Israel are thus
difficult to arrange. Surgeons frequently request Haredi
rabbis to appeal to their followers to agree to organ
transplants from corpses of their relatives in order to save
lives. The surgeons' argument is based upon the Jewish
religious law giving priority to saving Jewish lives. In
this discussion Rabbi Sheinberger put the condition that
only a Haredi rabbi could authorize such transplants. He
explained: "Jewish religious law states that it is forbidden
to transplant Jewish organs into either non-Jews or Jews who
are not pious. It is obvious that it is prohibited under
any circumstances to transplant Jewish organs into Arabs,
all of whom hate Jews." Rabbi Sheinberger, when asked for
his definition of a Jew who is not pious, replied that a
rabbi must determine the status of every Jew. Sheinberger's
request caused a huge commotion and was rejected.
Many non-Haredi rabbis allow an organ of a non-Jew to be
transplanted into a body of a Jew in order to save the life
of the Jew. They, however, oppose the transplant of an
organ from a Jew into the body of a non-Jew. Some important
rabbis go much further in discussing and ruling about
differences between Jews and non-Jews on medical matters.
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential member of the Habad
movement and the head of a yeshiva near Nablus
[...] opined in an April 26, 1996
Jewish Week article, reproduced in Haaretz
that same day: "If every single cell in a Jewish body
entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand
of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special
about Jewish DNA." Rabbi Ginsburgh drew two conclusions
from this statement: "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take
the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah
would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite
value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish
life than about non-Jewish life." It is noteworthy that
Rabbi Ginsburgh is one of the authors of a book lauding
Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarch's Cave murderer. In that
book Ginsburgh contributed a chapter in which he wrote that
a Jew's killing non-Jews does not constitute murder
according to the Jewish religion and that killing of
innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue.
No influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed
Ginsburgh's statements; most Israeli politicians have
remained silent; some Israeli politicians have openly
supported him.
Israel
Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in
Israel, Pluto Press, London and Sterling Virginia, 1999,
pp. 42-43.
|
Four Things
You Might Consider Doing
(1)
Balance your coverage of Ukrainian-Jewish relations
Your relying on the folk legends of your ancestors to renew
accusations of Ukrainian "pogroms" in the newspapers under your
control, while at the same time ignoring stories such as Israelis
murdering a Ukrainian guest worker in order to transplant his heart
into a Jew, paints a distorted picture of the nature of
Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
A truer picture is that Ukrainians have historically played a role
toward Jews similar to the one Palestinians are playing today, which
is to say that Ukrainians have been exploited and oppressed and
dispossessed, and have occasionally staged rebellions in an attempt
to regain their freedom, rebellions which your ancestors chose to
label "pogroms," and which you today prefer to label "terrorism."
(2)
Warn guest workers and tourists
You might consider using your newspaper empire to warn
Gastarbeiter in Israel that they stand in danger of losing their
lives, the more so if they are young and healthy. Similarly,
you might caution a young and healthy and non-Jewish tourist,
especially one travelling alone, that organ-hungry Israel is capable
of asking him to follow in the footsteps of Scottish tourist
Alastair Sinclair, and you might caution such a tourist more
particularly to avoid venturing alone on a tour of an
organ-harvesting facility such as Abu Kabir. Perhaps, too,
your newspapers could recommend the movie Coma to non-Jews
thinking of visiting Israel.
(3) Stop the
United States from repeating its favorite mistake
The United States repeatedly makes the mistake of creating
institutions that are inherently evil, that grow strong, and that
then need to be destroyed, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, and of the
Taliban, offering current examples. Israel has today emerged
as by far the biggest, and by far the most dangerous, instance of
this same mistake. Today's Israel has been created largely by
the United States, it has degenerated into barbarism, its
misbehavior is destabilizing not just the Middle East but the whole
world, and yet the United States cannot at this point implement its
habitual response of carpet bombing it into submission because
Israel has acquired hundreds of nuclear weapons and because Jews
exercise strong influence over the press and over the American
government.
The great problem faced by the world at the beginning of our century
is that of de-clawing Israel without getting scratched, or perhaps
more accurately, is that of defusing Israel without getting blown
up. By joining the effort to civilize Israel, you would become
part of the solution; by continuing your defense of a savage Israel,
you remain part of the problem.
(4)
Re-activate Jewish mechanisms of self-correction
Israel's regression into barbarism and savagery was made possible,
or rather was rendered inevitable, by the de-activation of
mechanisms of self-correction within Jewish culture. Jewish
influence over the press, and the use of this influence to inhibit
criticism of Jews, is the leading instance of such a de-activation
of a mechanism of self-correction. A current example of
self-correction activated in the service of non-Jews is the evident
Catholic effort to correct its sinning clergy, but with no
comparable self-correction evident among Jews, even when the Jewish
clergy stands in much greater need of correction, as I documented in
my letter to Ezra Levant, titled Good Priests, Bad Rabbis, of
15-Apr-2002.
Anyone who views the Catholic clergy being pilloried for its sins,
even when some of these sins are feebly documented, while the Jewish
clergy is granted comparative impunity for its more egregious and
better documented sins — anyone who views this differential
treatment, I say — as a victory for Jews is mistaken, for in fact it
is a stunning Jewish defeat because impunity is a cancer and a
curse. It is, then, particularly the work of media lords like
yourself that serves to drag the Jewish people down.
From this point of view, the greatest service that you or anybody
can perform for the Jewish people is to hold them not to a lower
standard than the rest of mankind, but to the same standard; is to
give then not the curse of immunity from criticism, but the blessing
of criticism as severe as that given to others; is to give them not
the disease of impunity for their crimes, but the health of full
punishment.
What the Jewish people need in order to be saved, in other words, is
less of the sort of writing that you publish in your newspapers, and
more of the sort that I publish on the Internet. As this
perspective is increasingly adopted, history will come to ask who
has injured Jews most, and who has assisted them most, and according
to this criterion will mark your work as having served to destroy
Judaism, and will mark my work as having served to redeem it.
As it is possible that in your reading of the present letter, the
accusation of anti-Semitism will have intruded itself into your
thoughts, I ask you to remember that in an impartial evaluation of
our respective roles toward the Jewish people, it is likely to be
concluded that it is you — together with the Born-to-Kill members of
Jewish intelligence and police and armed forces units that your
newspapers defend — who are playing the role of anti-Semites.
Lubomyr Prytulak
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Voices of Palestine, 2002. |
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