A British MP associates Israelis with the notorious doctor of Auschwitz. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
Truth is often one of the earliest casualties in the propaganda war, especially when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. Recently British MP George Galloway, who is known for his pro-Palestinian bias, associated Israel with Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor at Auschwitz who experimented with concentration camp inmates.
According to Galloway, ”the body parts of Palestinian prisoners were systematically harvested without the knowledge or consent of their families”.
Galloway based his claim on a report aired on Swedish television in which fact and fiction merged into a thick stew. However, he says that Palestinian sources support his thesis.
A decade ago, there was a public outcry in Israel after it became known that doctors had taken body parts from fallen Israeli soldiers and some dead civilians, both Jews and Arabs, without notifying their relatives of the matter. In 2001, the Israeli Ministry of Health set up a commission to investigate the issue and ”forbade organ removal from deceased persons without family permission”.
The Israeli government also tightened legislation on the issue, broke up organ trafficking rings and prosecuted ”those involved both directly and indirectly. ”
After this, two notorious cases of organ trafficking were reported. Three men were indicted, two of them Israeli Arabs and a Jewish surgeon who was arrested in Ukraine.
Israelis never conducted experiments on living Palestinians. They did not ”harvest” organs from prisoners or kill any prisoners in order to do so. The kidneys and other organs were from dead Israelis and Palestinians.
In contrast, Mengele experimented with living prisoners. Galloway’s claim of Israelis playing ”mini-Mengele” turns out to be a bizarre distortion of what really happened. The real issue might well have to do with anti-Semitism.
Sources:
Galloway, George. 2009. Dark echoes of Holocaust. Daily Record (28 December) http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2009/12/dark-echoes-of-holocaust.html
Israel Reiterates Hard Line on Illegal Organ Trafficking Following Revelations of Decade-old Case. The Israel Project. (21 December 2009.) http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=3587015&content_id=%7B428A17E4-5043-4712-83D4-1037E77FF4B9%7D¬oc=1
Israelis "Playing Mini-Mengele". Honest Reporting (29 December)
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Israelis_Playing_Mini-Mengele.asp
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