explosive information related to alleged Israeli organ harvesting

Dear friends,

We want to alert you to some additional, fairly explosive information related to alleged Israeli organ harvesting that researcher/writer Michelle Kinnucan recently uncovered:

In June 2001, the premier expert on international organ trafficking, Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley and Organs Watch testified to the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.

She described a "multi-million dollar business" that the Israeli Ministry of Health refused "to intervene and crack down on." She stated:

"... hundreds of kidney patients from Israel ... travel in privately brokered 'transplant tourist' junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania .... to Russia ... and to South Africa ...

"While in Israel for Organs Watch in the summer of [2000] and, again in March 2001, ... I interviewed more than 50 transplants professionals, transplant patients, and organs buyers and sellers involved in commercialized transplants ... none were willing to condemn a practice which they saw as 'saving lives'...

"Meanwhile, human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinians by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv...

"A more troubling phenomenon is the support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the illicit national 'program' of transplant tourism. Some patients who traveled with the outlaw Israeli transplant surgeon to other countries noted that in each of the organized transplant groups were members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them."

In light of the attacks against Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom and the newspaper that published his article, we feel that this additional information should be distributed widely.

Also, a petition is now posted online at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/

While we realize that there are a great number of online petitions and they have limited effectiveness, we urge you to view this one and sign it if you agree with its content. We feel it provides a valuable synopsis of the issues involved.

* * *

Clarification: The original version of Alison's article contained a sentence in a parentheses near the end of the piece that may have seemed to say that Israeli professor and author Israel Shahak also believed there was a basis to the blood libel accusations. In reality, the findings that were similar to Professor Toaff’s were Shahak’s information on Talmudic texts emphasizing vengeance and on religious violence within some medieval Jewish communities – and not that there had been ritual killings of Christians.

We urge people to read Shahak's book (http://tinyurl.com/mob8py ) to learn his findings for themselves. It is also posted here (http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html ).

To see more on this, please see Alison's entry "Israeli organ harvesting?" http://alisonweir.org/

Best wishes,

If Americans Knew

Additional Links:

• Translation of the Swedish article: http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
• Alison Weir's article: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/sweden.html
• Weir's Blog entry: http://alisonweir.org/journal/2009/9/1/israeli-organ-harvesting.html
• The petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/