Swedish "Blood Libel" Affair

There has been a full-blown diplomatic crisis in the past month over an article written in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet by one Donald Bostrom, who produced a completely biased and unsubstantiated article accusing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs for transplant purposes. Honest Reporting.com has written an article on the controversy, which can be accessed below:

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Swedish_Blood_Libel_The_Aftermath.asp


Bostrom traveled to Gaza a few days after IDF forces shot and killed a Palestinian male named Bilal Ghanan, who Bostrom referred to as a "rock-thrower" high the IDF's wanted list (sounds strange right there). At any rate, the IDF shot the man and took him away since he was wounded and still alive. A week later, they returned his dead body to his village. During the burial, his family observed that his body had been cut open vertically along his entire upper torso to his chin-then stitched back together. Bostrom's report showed a photo of the body, which he claims to have seen. Nobody has confirmed that the body's organs are missing. (Israeli officials state that the captured bodies of dead Palestinians are routinely autopsied.)

Link this to the July arrests in New Jersey of some local officials and rabbis in a plot to sell organ transplants out of Israel. The story of the arrests led off Bostrom's article (with a photo of one Levy Ishak Rosenbaum doing the perp walk in handcuffs), which then went on to describe illicit organ transplants in Israel before going on to the killing of Ghanan. Bostrom's article implies that it is all connected.

Yet, as the uproar broke out, Bostrom has back-tracked and claimed that he doesn't know if Ghanan's organs were removed and the family states that they never said explicitly that his organs were removed. Bostrom, however, shows his bias in a debate on television with an Israeli university lecturer named Mordichai Kedar when he states that "it is well-documented that Israel violates international law on a daily basis." (see interview below)



As you can see from the interview, Kedar accuses Bostrom of engaging in shoddy journalism and taking the words of the Palestinians regarding the circumstances of Ghanan's death and the likelihood that his organs were removed. I have to agree with Kedar's accusation. Kedar is also correct that many Western journalists have been willingly played like fiddles by Hamas and Hizbollah, who will feed them all kinds of IDF horror stories-knowing they will be published in the West as fact.

Medical experts will tell you-as Honest Reporting points out- that taking organs from dead bodies for transplant is much harder than using live donors due to the short amount of time those organs can be used. Bostrom also makes a big leap in trying to make a connection between the killing of Ghanan and the arrests in New Jersey.

But there is a more serious issue here, which is why the matter is being referred to as the "Swedish Blood Libel". This story does nothing more than feed into the old Jewish blood libel that said that Jews ritually kill non-Jewish children to use their blood for religious observances. Absurd as it is, this story still has currency in much of the Middle East, as Honest Reporting illustrates.

What is needed here would be for an independent or unbiased entity to physically determine if Ghanan's (or anyone else's) organs are missing. And even then at this point, who knows what has been done to his body and by whom? Along those lines, who could you find to be an impartial observer? Certainly not Mr Bostrom.