CREATING DETERRENCE AGAINST A WAVE OF TERROR

From: Mark Rosenblit

Sent: Friday, December 25, 2015 2:55 PM

To: letters@jpost.com

Subject: Creating Deterrence Against A Wave Of Terror

 

A recent Jerusalem Post Editorial (“100 days of terrorism”) states the obvious.   Due to a combination of ideological, theological and financial reasons and incentives, potential Arab terrorists are deterred neither by the prospect of home demolition nor death.  On the contrary, among those planning to murder Jews, a martyr’s death has long become both a societal and personal objective.   How can Israel disincentivize such Evil?   The answer is by turning Death into Life.  My proposal is that Israel announce that all terrorists’ corpses will automatically be forfeited to the State, with an eye towards harvesting usable organs for transplant into Israeli recipients.  Whether or not organs are actually found to be suitable for transplant, the government should periodically announce (truthfully or not) that an identified terrorist’s eyes, kidneys, liver, etc., have been donated to a certain number of unidentified Israelis.   While, in a perfect World, this proposal would never be seriously considered, Israel’s present failure to deter this Evil requires some creative thinking.   I am convinced that, from the perspective of the potential terrorist, the possibility that his or her death might save the lives of one or more Israelis will serve as a powerful deterrent against embracing that goal.  While the World will howl in protest, Jewish lives will be saved by this combination of deterrence and organ transplantation.



Regards

Mark Rosenblit

 

 

 

 

[Note:  For several years, Israel has already being accused -- falsely -- of harvesting Arab organs.  So, Jews are already being demonized without receiving any of the benefits of deterrence.   Read on!]

 

Israel aghast at Swedish report on IDF

 

By Herb Keinon

 

(Jerusalem Post, August 19, 2009) The Foreign Ministry responded furiously on Tuesday to a story in Sweden's largest circulation daily, Aftonbladet, that accused IDF soldiers of abducting Palestinians to steal their organs, saying this was a grotesque throwback to the blood libels of the Middle Ages.

 

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor characterized the story as "racist hysteria at its worst."

 

"No one should tolerate such a demonizing piece of medieval blood libel that surely encourages hate crimes against Jews," Palmor said. "This is a shame to freedom of expression, and all Swedes should reject it unconditionally."

 

Israel's embassy in Stockholm was expected to issue a sharp denunciation.

 

In the story, headlined "They plunder the organs of our sons," and accompanied by a gruesome photograph, Palestinians are quoted as saying IDF soldiers kidnapped their sons and stole organs.

 

Haaretz quoted Donald Bostrom as writing the following: "'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin, as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied."

 

The article makes reference to the recent arrests in New Jersey of several US Jews, including rabbis, for a number of alleged crimes, including brokering the sale of organs for transplant.

 

The story also cites allegations of similar instances of organ-snatching in 1992, during the first intifada.

 

The Foreign Ministry was not the only party aghast at the story, and smelling the stench of anti-Semitism. A competing newspaper, Sydsvenskan, ran an op-ed on the story under the headline "Antisemitbladet," in an obvious reference to Aftonbladet's name.

 

"Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors," wrote Swedish columnist Mats Skogkֳ₪r. "That is all it takes. After all, we all know what they [the Jews] are like, don't we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything. Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: 'Anti-Semitism? No, no, just criticism of Israel.'"

 

(©) The Jerusalem Post

 

 

Palestinian news agency 'confirms' organ snatching story

 

By Khaled Abu Toameh

 

(Jerusalem Post, August 23, 2009) The Bethlehem-based Palestinian news agency Ma'an published a report over the weekend which it said confirmed allegations that IDF soldiers kill Palestinian civilians to harvest their organs.

 

The charges appeared last week in Sweden's left-leaning Aftonbladet newspaper and have since been widely quoted in Palestinian and Arab newspapers.

 

"They plunder the organs of our sons," read the headline in Sweden's largest daily newspaper, which devoted a double spread in its cultural section to the article.

 

Ma'an, which is funded by Denmark and the Netherlands, headlined its feature: "Disappearances, Holding Bodies, Organ Theft - Intertwined Crimes."

 

The feature is based on an interview with Abdel Nasser Farwaneh, a former security prisoner in Israel who is described by the news agency as an "expert on prisoners' affairs."

 

Farwaneh is quoted as saying that the "findings" published by the Swedish newspaper are true.

 

"All the facts, evidence and testimonies over the past few decades regarding the way the occupation forces were treating and killing innocent civilians don't leave room for doubt about the credibility of the report in the Swedish newspaper," he said.

 

The "expert" claimed that hundreds of Palestinian and Arab prisoners have disappeared in Israeli detention centers and prisons.

 

"This policy of hiding prisoners is surely connected to what the Swedish newspaper published," Farwaneh said. "It's possible that all those missing prisoners, or a large number of them, were deliberately killed so that their organs could be stolen and used illegally. The remains of these prisoners are then hidden in secret cemeteries known as the Cemeteries of Numbers."

 

Farwaneh told the agency that there was also good reason to believe that the allegations were true because many bodies of Hizbullah gunmen that were returned by Israel were missing organs.

 

He also claimed that IDF soldiers had "executed" more than 50 civilians after arresting them during the second intifada, which began in September 2000. "This could be related to what the Swedish newspaper reported about organ harvesting," he said.

 

Farwaneh expressed deep admiration for the Swedish newspaper and the journalist who reported the allegations, Donald Bostrom, and called on the international media to follow suit and expose Israeli "atrocities and war crimes" against Palestinians.

 

(©) The Jerusalem Post

 

 

When blood libel becomes part of 'Kultur'

 

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

 

(Jerusalem Post, August 25, 2009) Few readers of the Israeli or Jewish media will have missed the reports about a recent article in a Swedish tabloid that accused Israel of abducting and killing Palestinian civilians to harvest their organs.

 

Since the story broke last week, a number of interesting commentaries have been written; among the most worthwhile to check out is JPost Columnist Barry Rubin's article "Stop the pressses: Blood libel goes mainstream" on his blog The Rubin Report, which includes several updates on additional developments and information.

 

I must confess that I was struck by a perhaps rather marginal aspect of the story: the fact that the article was published in the "Kultur" [English-language translation: “Culture”] section of the paper. There may be some entirely mundane reasons for this arguably odd placement, but I felt that by publishing the article in the "Kultur" section, the paper's editors had -- probably unwittingly -- made a very fitting choice.

 

AS ARIEH Kovler notes in a superb article "Recycling Old Libels" on the website of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, the author of the Swedish tabloid article claims that rumors of organ theft by Israelis are common among Palestinians. Kovler suggests that one reason for the popularity of such rumors could be the Middle East's popular culture, specifically "the Iranian TV series Zahra's Blue Eyes, broadcast in late 2004 and later dubbed for an Arabic audience. The plot involves the IDF conspiring to harvest Palestinians' eyes for transplant into blind Israelis."

 

According to a Memri report on the series, one episode also included a story that claimed that "the Israeli president is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children." Barry Rubin mentions a similarly-themed Turkish film.

 

Another very important point highlighted by Kovler is that the accusations in the Swedish paper not only echo the blood libels of the past, but also suggest that Israelis resemble the Nazis: "The Nazis treated Jews as raw materials rather than people, to be worked, killed or experimented on. The accusation that Israel would use the Palestinian as living organ banks is an inversion of this aspect of the Holocaust thrown back at Jews."

 

As chance would have it, just a day after the Swedish paper published this article, the British Guardian carried a piece by the much celebrated philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Commenting on Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, Zizek did his best to make the Israel-Nazi comparison respectable: he not only accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing", but also argued that "Palestinians often use the problematic cliche of the Gaza strip as 'the greatest concentration camp in the world.' However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract 'prayers for peace' obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-free, and that we must accept the fact."

 

It is worth noting that the online version of the article, unlike the print version, originally included the term "Palestinian-frei", obviously intended to invoke the Nazis' "Judenfrei" [English-language translation:  “Jew-free”]. Moreover, Zizek not only suggested that it is becoming ever more legitimate to compare Gaza to a concentration camp; by asserting that "Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process", he also invoked the familiar theme that after 1945, all too many people claimed that they had not "known" what was happening to the Jews.

 

Needless to say, Zizek's claim that anything Israel does is "ignored by the media" is utterly ridiculous.

 

It was doubtless a coincidence that on two consecutive days, two major publications in two European countries gave out the message that Israel deserves to be compared to the Nazis - but it was arguably a revealing coincidence.

 

It's even more revealing when you check out Memri's "Anti-Semitism Documentation Project". Here are just a few recent titles: August 12, 2009: Article in Syrian Government Daily: The Holocaust - Part of a Reciprocal Conflict between Hitler and the Jewish Capitalists; Its Real Victims Are the Germans and the Palestinians;  June 11, 2009: Saudi Columnist: The Real Holocaust - Israel's Slaughter of the Palestinians;  May 11, 2009: Articles in Syrian Government Dailies on 'Bloodsucking,' 'Blood-Letting' Jews;  April 7, 2009: Jews Portrayed as Blood-Drinkers in Anti-Semitic Drama Aired on Hamas TV;  March 4, 2009: Omani Columnist: What the Jews Did in Germany 'Impelled Hitler to Punish [Them] For Their Bad Deeds'; 'The US Today Finds Itself in the Same Predicament as Germany Back Then.'

 

SO MAYBE it's time for a variation on the last item: what the Jews do today in Israel -- or what they are suspected and accused of doing -- impels some people to compare Israel to Hitler's Germany. Naturally, suspecting anti-Semitism as the root cause of such comparisons would cause lots of righteous indignation among all those oh-so-well-meaning folks who feel "impelled" to draw this comparison in order to express their "entirely legitimate" criticism of Israel's policies -- or of what they think Israel's policies are.

 

As Zizek demonstrated so well, it doesn't matter if it's about an "invisible process" -- if you are a clear-sighted philosopher, you can see that it doesn't really matter that today, there are more Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza than ever before in history, and you can clearly foresee the day when "the world will awake and discover that... the land is Palestinian-frei" -- ehm, make that "free", that's just so much more subtle, isn't it?

 

This article first appeared in the blog The Warped Mirror on JPost's BlogCentral.

 

(©) The Jerusalem Post

 

 

German University's course claims Israel harvests Palestinian organs

 

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL

 

Academic material reportedly says Israel commits genocide.

 

(Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2016) BERLIN - An academic seminar at a German university claims Israel’s military harvests organs from Palestinians and the Jewish state is responsible for a genocide.

 

“Our sons were robbed of their organs,” was the title of a part of the seminar’s  course material, Rebecca Seidler, an  academic who blew the whistle on the anti-Israel material, told the weekly German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung in a Thursday article.

 

The paper reported that the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HAWK) offers a course on “The Social Situation of Youths in Palestine,” which contains the allegedly anti-Semitic material.

 

After reviewing the content of the course, Seidler, who was slated to conduct the seminar, complained to the university’s management.  The Dean of the faculty of Social Work and Health, Christa Paulini, dismissed Seidler’s criticism in a telephone conversation as being overly-sensitive.

 

Seidler  told the JAZ that material showed “a picture of a genocide on the Palestinians, an ethnic cleansing as well as a complete disenfranchisement of Palestinians by Israel.”

 

The seminar syllabus also covered the “victims of torture in Israeli prisons,” said Seidler. The JAZ wrote the seminar conveyed “anti-Semitic stereotypes.”

 

Jerusalem Post press queries to the HAWK media department on Sunday were not immediately returned. The HAWK instructor Ibtissam Köhler prepared the seminar material, which also contained an anti-Israel essay from a right-wing extremist magazine titled “Compact.”

 

The seminar was slated for the semester 2015/2016. It is unclear how long the HAWK has conducted anti-Israel seminars.

 

The HAWK is located in Hildesheim, a small city in the state of Lower Saxony, Germany, with a population of nearly 100,000.

 

HAWK’s president Christiane Dienel told the German wire service DPA on Friday that an ethics commission examined the seminar and it in “no way propagates anti-Semitic or anti-Israel content.”

 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York City, an organization that combats anti-Semitism, termed the allegation of harvesting organs to be a “new Blood Libel.”

 

The ADL wrote  on its website: ”The allegation that Jews murder non-Jews to use their blood for ritual or medicinal purposes dates back to the Middle Ages and has spawned many variants over time. “

 

In 2010, the ADL said” The false and malicious report in a Swedish newspaper that Israeli soldiers abducted and killed Palestinians, including children, to harvest their organs has mushroomed into a global conspiracy theory. Within months, the story has generated several conspiracy theories about various Jewish plots to harvest organs from victims around the globe, including from kidnapped Algerian and Ukrainian children and from Haitians pulled from the rubble of the earthquake that devastated their nation.”

 

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