Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5691805.ab

Publicerad: 2009-08-26

"Our sons are plundered of their organs"

[Photo: Young Palestinian men throwing stones and bottles at Israeli
soldiers in the northern West Bank. In this area, Bilal Achmed Ghanan was
shot to death and cut up in a hospital. "Our sons are being used as organ
reserves," claim the Palestinians. Foto: Donald Boström ]

[Photo: Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19, was shot and taken away by Israeli
soldiers. The body was returned stitched together from the belly to the
neck. Foto: Donald Boström]

[Photo: Levy Izhak Rosenbaum being led away by FBI agents. Rosenbaum is
alleged to have functioned as a middleman in the illegal organ trafficking
scheme. Foto: AP]


Palestinians accuse the Israel Defense Forces of taking organs from their
victims.

Donald Boström writes about an international organ trafficking scandal - and
about the time he saw the cut-up dead body of a nineteen-year old
Palestinian.

You could call me a "matchmaker", said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn,
USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a
client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested
and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal
organ-trade was revealed in New Jersey: Rabbis, politicians and trusted
civil servants had for years bin involved in money laundering and illegal
organ-trade.

Rosenbaum's matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about
buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says
that he buys the kidneys for 10 000 dollars, from poor people. He then
proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for 160 000
dollars.

The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they
are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in
the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: "Quite a
lot. And I have never failed," he boasts. The business has been running for
quite some time.

Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of
the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, tells the same
newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel,
is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5 - 6 000 operations a
year, about ten per cent of the world's kidney transplants are carried out
illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and
China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But
Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions that young men have been siezed,
and made to serve as organ reserve, just as in China and Pakistan, before
being killed - a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to
motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation
about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with
organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ
collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that "the
rest of the European countries are expected to follow France's example
shortly."

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the
2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin
America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but
do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is
the only western country with a medical profession that doesn't condemn the
illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors
participating in the illegal business - on the contrary, chief medical
officers of Israel's big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal
transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, -03).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to
address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at
having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation. Half a
million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was
the first person to sign up.

A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a
success. No fewer than 35 000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it
would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy
Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still
large. 500 people were in line for kidney transplant, but only 124
transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver only
three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, 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.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories.
There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with
ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was
approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons
contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were
prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting
network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestininan
families in the West Bank and Gaza - meeting parents who told of how their
sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I
encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed
Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column
sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts
of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still,
waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others
hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the
curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for
the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the
electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone - not even a cat
could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of
the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don't remember if
our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on
May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village's carpentry
workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action
was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters
who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the
military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he
hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught
meant torture and death for these boys - they had to stay in the mountains
at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked
unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother,
knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to
restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The
soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and
calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they
needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest.
According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot
with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry
workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by
his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair.
Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close
by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care.
Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim.
Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a
jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military
helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.
Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who
had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel
Aviv, to the place for his final rest. "Captain Yahya is the worst of them
all," the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body
and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of
the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing
cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from
the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal
was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to
the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to.
Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit
from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what
had happened: "Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors," relatives of
Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the
uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number
of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

- Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us
bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they
performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious?
Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort?
Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity
interrupted? Nafe's uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to
the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army
claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian
victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem
was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to
the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street,
explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in
school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were between four
months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through
postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians - of
which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and
illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the
authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the
big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We
also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought
back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back
together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It's time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what
is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel
since the Intifada began.

Donald Boström

Translation from swedish: Henrik Karlsson

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/31/gordon
Israel and Academic Freedom
August 31, 2009

Neve Gordon has no illusions about the ability of Palestinian terrorists
to harm Israelis. In 1986, while serving as a paratrooper on Israel's
border with Lebanon, he suffered severe injuries from hand grenades and
bullets.

These days, Gordon is under a very different kind of attack -- one that
he and other Israeli academics say endangers the state of academic
freedom in their country. Gordon is the chair of politics at Ben-Gurion
University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and
publishes widely in Israel and the United States -- with much of his
writing critical of his country's government. Ten days ago, he published
an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he called Israel an
"apartheid state" and called for an international boycott of Israel to
push the creation of a Palestinian state.

Reaction was immediate and intense -- donors (many of them American)
threatened to stop giving to Ben-Gurion, Israeli political leaders lined
up to condemn Gordon, and his university's leaders expressed disgust
with the piece, with comments suggesting he might want to work
elsewhere. Gordon has tenure, which is Israel is roughly equivalent to
what it is in the United States, and his university acknowledges that he
can't be fired over the op-ed.

But in a move that stunned and outraged many Israeli academics
(including many who disagree with Gordon's analysis), the university
also said it was looking for legal ways to discipline him. Scholars like
Gordon have long criticized Israel's policies -- from their home
country, the United States and elsewhere -- without being disciplined,
so the reaction to this essay is seen as significant far beyond Gordon's
op-ed.

"The infliction of such sanctions is a declaration of war on freedom of
speech and academic freedom. It will have very grave consequences for
the Israeli academic community and will harm greatly its international
reputation," says a petition being circulated by professors at Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv University and the University of Haifa.

In the United States, the Middle East Studies Association (which has in
the past sent letters protesting the treatment of scholars in Egypt,
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and areas controlled by the Palestinian
Authority, among others) last week sent a letter to Ben-Gurion
University, saying: "In refusing to reiterate the university’s
obligation to protect Dr. Gordon’s professional and civil freedoms and
in failing to clarify that it will not be blackmailed into suspending
the freedoms of particular faculty members that some donors do not like,
your administration has given a green light to those attacking him and
in some cases threatening his physical safety."

In interviews, both Gordon and his university's president said that
their views were being distorted -- but they have very different views
of the controversy and its implications.

Gordon and His Op-Ed

Gordon is currently on a trip to the United States, doing research for
his next book (on homeland security issues) and preparing to speak later
this week in Toronto at the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association. He said in an interview that he didn't always
believe in a boycott, and that he came to this view gradually, based on
his research and his interactions with Palestinians.

"Growing up, I was never aware of the Palestinian narrative of these
issues," he said. But now he is. He came first to believe that Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and its objections to the creation of
Palestinian state there and in Gaza were both morally wrong and
destructive to Israel. This view shows up in his political writing and
his scholarly work. His most recent book is Israel's Occupation,
published last year by the University of California Press.

The argument in the op-ed is about what to do about the occupation.
Gordon writes that he has come to the view that the Israeli public will
shift its views only if faced with tough outside pressure. "It is
therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend
in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and
condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have
yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision
to withdraw from the occupied territories," he writes.

Specifically, Gordon endorsed the Bilboa Initiative, which calls for a
boycott conducted in a "gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to
context and capacity." Expanding on what this means in the interview,
Gordon said that it would start with a boycott of products produced by
Israeli entities in the West Bank, and might expand to companies that
help with occupation, gradually growing to hit more of Israeli society,
but with time for the sanctions to have an impact.

Boycotts are extremely sensitive in Israeli higher education because
British and some American academics have been pushing for boycotts of
Israel academe -- a push that has been widely condemned by American
academics as antithetical to academic freedom. Gordon said the boycott
he supports is institutional, not individual, and that he would not
support an action that cut off ties between individual academics. Gordon
also noted that boycotts are a non-violent way to take a stand.

But he said it was reasonable to ask American and other academics (not
at the first stage of the boycott, but eventually) to at the very least
demand, for example, that conferences in Israel include some
acknowledgment of the moral issues associated with governing
Palestinians against their will.

Many boycott critics say that such actions would hold Israel to a higher
standard than other countries because American academics, for example,
regularly work in countries in the Middle East that deny basic rights to
women, for example. But Gordon said he believes this ignores the ability
of academics to turn down such work. He said he was recently invited to
give a talk at a university in Kazakhstan, with a nice stipend, all
expenses paid -- and he turned it down based on the country's political
and human rights records. "The fact that someone offers you a fat check
doesn't mean you have to go there," he said.

Gordon said he has not heard directly from his university's senior
administrators, but that he has been approached by faculty members who
were urged to persuade him to consider quitting -- which he has no
intention of doing.

Ben-Gurion University has been "a wonderful academic home" for his work,
Gordon said. He has worked there for 10 years and has "wonderful
colleagues and students." In the past, when his critical writings have
come to the attention of donors or government officials, Gordon said
that the response has always been what he would expect: University
leaders said that they disagreed with him, but that Gordon spoke for
himself and had the right to do so.

"The issue is not about whether they disagree with me," he said. "One of
the jobs of the university president is raising money, and she has to
cater to the people that provide the money, so a strong letter of
condemnation of my views would have been fine with me. But there's a
difference between saying you disagree with me, and threatening me."

Until now, Gordon said, he would have said that academic freedom in
Israel was strong (except for Israeli controls on West Bank higher
education), but in his opinion something has changed. "I think the
reaction from my university should be a red flag for people," he said.

The Reaction

It didn't take long for Gordon's piece to attract an audience in the
United States -- particularly of those who are supporters of Israel. The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the country's consul-general in
Los Angeles fired off a memo to the university saying: "Since the
article was published, I've been contacted by people who care for
Israel; some of them are benefactors of Ben-Gurion University.... They
were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your
institution. My attempt to explain that one bad apple would affect
hundreds of researchers turned out to be futile."

Israel's education minister, Gideon Sa'ar, called the Gordon article
"repugnant and deplorable."

But amid all the condemnations were also statements from university
leaders suggesting that Gordon should look for another job and might
face sanctions for what wrote. Rivka Carmi, president of the university,
gave a statement to Israeli journalists in which she said: "This vile
and audacious criticism of the state of Israel damages the excellent
academic work being done in Israel and its universities.... Academics
with such feelings about their country are welcome to look for another
home, whether personal or professional."

Amos Drory, vice president for external affairs of the university, sent
out e-mail messages to complaining donors in which he said: "While the
university recognizes the importance of the principle of academic
freedom, it feels that Gordon's call for a boycott will cause direct
harm to BGU -- and all Israeli universities -- and to Israeli society as
a whole. The university is currently exploring the legal options
available to take disciplinary action."

Carmi, in an interview, insisted that the controversy and the
university's response did not endanger professors' rights.

"I have to make it very clear that this is not about academic freedom,"
she said. "The freedom to research, to teach, to debate on issues within
the framework of academia" is protected, she said. But Gordon "created a
new reality" when he published his views, with his university
identification.

"Hundreds and hundreds" of people have sent her e-mails, not only
expressing outrage at Gordon's views, but with many of them saying they
believed his views represented those of the university.

Asked about Gordon's strong reputation as a researcher and teacher,
Carmi said that -- since she is a medical researcher and he is a
political scientist -- she wasn't in a position to judge.

She said that she agreed that the tenure system would make it impossible
to fire Gordon, but said that she didn't view the possibility of
disciplinary action as violating the principles of academic freedom. She
stressed that an academic boycott of Israel universities would hurt
those institutions, and that a broader boycott of the country would
similarly do so.

"This is the first time we are encountering such a situation so we are
looking into something that has never happened before, but this is going
to affect the university," she said.

Repeating her view that this dispute isn't about academic freedom, she
said the real question is: "If somebody damages or hurts the university
in a certain way, what does it mean?"
— Scott Jaschik