Say It Isn't So!
Those dreadful, sleazy, slanderous allegations that surfaced months ago accusing members of the IDF and hinting at state collusion of organ harvesting that so mortified Jews and supporters of Israel as vicious attempts to blacken the reputation of Jews and of the Jewish state could not possibly have any relation to reality. So the Swedish newspaper that first published those allegations in a raw accusation, relating a second-hand accounting from Gaza following the Cast Lead operation was dismissed and the source derided.
Organ harvesting is an odious, inhuman and growing trade, focusing on a real need in society to obtain organs for implantation into ailing humans whose own organs have failed due to disease or other conditions leading to organ failure. Most societies in most countries hope that through a generosity of spirit, people will sign organ-donor cards permitting their organs to be taken upon death for speedy transplantation into the bodies of those on a transplant list, thus endowing one ill person with renewed life opportunities at the demise of another, through an altruistic act.
There are some countries where organ harvesting is legal internally, like Iran, where someone is permitted under state law to sell a body organ as long as it is transplanted to another Iranian citizen. In most countries organ harvesting is illegal and regarded as illicit and for good reasons. Most people would balk at selling their body organs, but some do come forward to gift body organs such as kidneys to those whom they love whose own are failing.
China has long been accused of harvesting body organs from executed prisoners. And of harvesting body organs from imprisoned members of China-outlawed Falun Gong members. 12,000 livers and kidneys are harvested yearly in China for transplantation. Transplant-tourism is big business in China, and citizens of other countries travel there regularly for transplantation.
According to the World Health Organization, besides China and Pakistan, other countries where kidneys are reportedly sold "include Bolivia, Brazil, Iraq, Israel, the Republic of Moldova, Peru and Turkey. Israel? Obviously there's been a dreadful error made. That cannot be possible. Jews would never, ever lend themselves to such a descent from human decency to depraved depredations for the sake of making a killing. Almost literally.
And then, the awakening. The news that Israeli police have arrested six men suspected of having involved themselves in an organ trafficking ring within the country. One of the suspects, an Israeli army reserves brigadier-general, and two lawyers, one of them 77 years of age, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. The morally inconceivable is possible, after all.
A quaintly-named government agency, the Department for Fraud and Misappropriation in northern Israel has apparently been conducting an undercover investigation in the wake of a complaint from a Palestinian woman. A 50-year-old Nazareth woman who responded to a newspaper advertisement, in Arabic which offered one hundred thousand dollars for a kidney.
Would someone not in desperate financial straits even consider such an offer? She was flown to Eastern Europe where her kidney was extracted. She contacted the authorities to complain because the money promised her was never forthcoming. And hers was not the only complaint. In their investigation police uncovered a large, organized organ trafficking industry.
This well organized ring comprised of a high-placed official and lawyers used local media and the Internet to advertise their 'services' preying on the vulnerable. It is precisely this kind of open advertising that the WHO use to assemble their data and statistics, leading them to pinpoint those countries which most often engage on this dreadful trafficking of human organs.
The promise of large remuneration in place of organs for people who are in deep financial stress helps these human vultures ply their trade.
Having signed a 'contract' and 'affidavits' claiming familial connections between donor and recipient, the 'donors' receive medical examinations categorizing blood types and medical conditions, then flown out to the Philippines or Ecuador or Eastern Europe for surgery.
Whereupon, organ extraction complete, the 'donors' return to Israel sans medical documents, and often suffering from medical-health complications related to the surgery.
As to where the receivers of these life-saving organs originate from, well they are the wealthy countries of the world. According to Organs Watch based at the University of California, "organ-importing countries" are, basically, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Oman, Saudi-Arabia and the U.S.A.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Human Rights, Israel
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, April 08, 2010
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