Monday, December 21 2009

The Forensics File

Western papers are picking up on this video aired on Israeli Channel 2 featuring an admission that personnel at Israel's Institute of Forensic Medicine (better known as simply Abu Kabir) harvested organs from Israelis and Palestinians without permission from the families.

The video was made in 2000 by Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, an anthropology professor at U. California-Berkeley, who was doing research there. According to AP, the professor released the video now because of the continuing controversy surrounding Donald Bostrom's Swedish blood libel claiming the IDF killed Palestinians for their organs. 

To its credit, The Guardian's coverage of the new video carefully noted:

However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported.

Abu Kabir is a civilian institution overseen by the Ministry of Health, and Dr. Yehuda Hiss and his staff have a lot to answer for. This could also become an Israeli political hot potato in the health ministry too because organ harvesting was a dodgy issue for Hiss years ago.

The IDF was never linked to improper activity before Bostrom's baseless buzz. It's clearly an issue of terrible violations of medical ethics where Israelis and Palestinians were victimized by Abu Kabir staff. Nothing indicates nationalistic-motivated malice.

But none of these facts reached the editors of Australia's Daily Telegraph, who absolutely mangled this headline:

So did The Local, a Swedish-based English-language site:

Posted at 01:56 PM

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