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Extracts:
We are not talking about a Saudi newspaper or Hamas radio station
but a Swedish newspaper. We are not talking about a neo-Nazi rag but a daily
closely tied to the Swedish Social Democratic Party. And we are not just talking
about an obscure item but an article that received top billing.
On August 18, Aftonbladet, Sweden's largest newspaper which claims 1.5 million
readers, published an article by a man named Donald Bostrom. The editor
responsible is named Asa Linderborg. She is the newspaper's cultural affairs'
editor.
This was no random decision for her. When asked once: "What do you wish for most
in life right now?" She answered: "What a simple question. What I want is a free
Palestine."
And what did this article say? That Israel's army deliberately kidnaps
Palestinian civilians and then murders them so it can cut out and sell their
organs to sick people needing transplants.
The Swedish story is based on Palestinian sources (though the author also claims
he has UN sources for it)--like so many slanders of Israel which are widely
purveyed. It is easy to forget that the false claim of a Jenin massacre--which
received massive coverage in the Western media--was based on an interview with a
single Palestinian who nobody even knew.
Palestinians simply told him that the bodies of terrorists or others killed came
back with organs missing. Any photos, medical records, documented complaints? Of
course not.
[Ironically, the Beirut Daily Star has a
very responsible article, with no claim of Israeli involvement, on the issue of
organ sales.]
[Also ironically in Lebanon its
the PLO who drained all of the blood out of the still living bodies of Lebanese
hospital patients to replenish supplies for their own wounded, Brit-Am editor.]
At this point you are no doubt thinking: This is some kind of sick joke.
Yes, it is. But the newspaper published it any way.
Apparently, the author is a left-wing activist for Palestinian causes, though
the newspaper calls him a journalist.
[By the way, this is not the first time
such accusations have been made. In the Turkish film, "Valley of the Wolves,"
Gary Busey
played an American Jewish doctor who was stealing the organs of Iraqis for the
United States and Israel. Note that the Turkish prime minister praised the film,
that it was shown to large Muslim audiences in Holland and elsewhere in Europe,
and that a friend who saw it in Syria noticed people crying in the theatre at
the sight of such evil behavior. Have no doubt: many thousands of people who saw
the film believe this accusation to be true.]
To show how typical this is, Radio Sweden has just broadcast once again the
claim that Israel murdered Muhammad Dura, a little boy who may or may not have
been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli or Fatah bullets. The only proof of
these claims was a very suspicious video (other parts of which show Palestinians
rehearsing for the show) which a French court has determined to be a fraud. That
court decision went unmentioned by Swedish radio.
As Ralph Haglund points out, a Swedish radio Middle East correspondent said he
is always ready to take the word of Hamas over that of Israel.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, Something is rotten in the state of Sweden.
At least, though, the competing newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, has blasted the
article which it says is an antisemitic blood libel without a shred of evidence.
What does this incident tell us? One thing is that there is no limit to the
insanity of how Israel is treated nowadays in so many supposedly responsible,
left-wing, and intellectual circles.
It also tells us that anyone of decency and good intentions should start
re-examining right now their credulity in accepting anti-Israel slanders,
nonsensical media or academic claims, or irresponsibly inaccurate "human rights"
group reports.
It also tells us that Jews who criticize Israel based on what they are being
taught at universities and what they see in the media need to think about what
they are doing. And, yes, all this bashing and chipping away at Israel's
reputation; this unfair blaming; this blindness toward the goals, behavior, and
ideology of radical Islamist forces and Palestinian intransigence is promoting
an antisemitism beyond anything seen in the Western world since 1945.
The time has come to realize that antisemitism, anti-Zionism, absurd
misrepresentation of Israel and the effort to wipe it off the map are all
tightly intertwined.
We have seen the rise of a systematic industry in wild anti-Israel claims by
Palestinians which are repeated without evidence by the Western news media and
others.
Yet this type of story about ghoulish Israeli monsters is actually rather
typical nowadays. The basic methodology in the Swedish case is like that of
dozens of others, only in this case the specific accusation was too lurid to win
wide acceptance in the West (though not in much of the Arabic-speaking and
Muslim majority world).
The recipe is simple: Palestinians make up charges, tell them to sympathetic
reporters or academics or "human rights'" officials who don't demand evidence,
and then are widely spread through other willing executioners of truth whose low
degree of professionalism and high level of politicization make them conducive
to becoming collaborators in the enterprise.
Before Israeli officials can investigate and present a detailed
response--largely ignored by the media--they are all off to the next lurid
accusation.
The fact that none of these accusations is ever ultimately proven correct seems
to have no effect on the industry.
In a variation of this theme, a few days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
publicly denounced, as if it was some sort of ethnic cleansing, the eviction of
two Palestinian families from an apartment building in Jerusalem. Apparently,
Palestinians had presented it as such to U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem.
In fact, as the public record clearly showed, this was merely the result of an
Israeli court decision following a long, detailed case lasting years, for
non-payment of rent. Palestinian families who paid rent in the building had no
problem at all.
The British newspaper of intellectuals and beautiful people, the Guardian,
carries an article which uses this incident, among other things, to claim that
Israel is a Nazi country. That's two families evicted for non-payment of rent,
not quite equivalent to seizing Austria and Czechoslovakia, invading all of
Europe, and murdering 12 million or so Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles,
Russians, etc., etc.
In fact, when the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein murdered tens of thousands
of Kurdish citizens in the 1990s or when the Syrian regime murdered 10,000 to
15,000 of its own citizens in Hamas in 1982, there was no outrage at all in the
West. There still isn't today.
After all, the hysterical misrepresentation of Israel increasingly seems to
parallel the tales of well-poisonings, ritual murders, and Zionist conspiracies
to seize world power of past eras.
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2009/08/stop-presses-blood-libel-goes.html
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