Bouthaina Shaaban is a Syrian Minister, a Warwick PhD, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was once awarded the Arab League’s “Most Distinguished Woman in a Governmental Position” Award, something I’m assuming they rotate among their two or three eligible contestants. She’s also kind of an antisemitic cretin, and this week she’s particularly excited about that excerable Swedish blood libel:
The investigative report written by Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom… about Israeli occupation forces killing Palestinians with the objective of stealing their organs raised a political and media storm in Israel meant to cover up a horrible crime perpetrated for years… [in 1992] Palestinians started to witness a sharp rise in the number of young Palestinians disappearing and of bodies of Palestinians killed by occupation forces being returned with organs like hearts, kidneys, livers and eyes missing…
Bostrom writes. “On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it… I traveled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza… who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Ahmed Ghanam”.
Of course those same Palestinian families have reported that they told Bostrom no such thing. And of course the editor of Bostrom’s paper, the venerable Aftonbladet, also admits that there’s no evidence of organ theft.
None of that matters: conspiracy theories do their persuasive work not by achieving mainstream public acceptance but by bringing something into the realm of acceptable public debate. Done and done.
Shaaban then elaborates on her antisemitic fantasy, breathlessly recounting lurid details that would have made the Nazis roll their eyes. The line “it was clear that Bilal’s body was slit from his abdomen up to his chin” is particularly striking, though you won’t want to miss her full paragraph about an impromptu Israeli torture scene. It involves IDF soldiers shooting the victim in his limbs and his stomach before dragging him through a field. How that left his organs sufficiently intact for transplant remains unclear, though it’s obviously not an operation beyond the means of diabolical Zionist Jew medicine.
The constant repetition of expertise, the whiff of slightly-too-specific details, and the hint of overcompensation in words like “definitely” and “clear” – those are all part and parcel of conspiracy rhetoric. But those verbal tics plus the gruesome obsession with imagined Jewish atrocities is a combination rarely found in such perfect form outside the Arab world. Pay particular attention to how the usual threads of conspiracism – expertise, details, overcompensation – get seamlessly woven into the rest of this feverish antisemitic tapestry:
Investigations in New Jersey, have proved that Rabbi Levy-Izhak (Isaac Rosenbaum) from Brooklyn and other rabbis have run for years Soprano-like networks to sell the kidneys of Palestinian martyrs in the US black market. Patients in the United States paid up to US$ 160,000 per kidney… When asked about the number of bodies sold by rabbi Rosenbaum, he answers proudly, “we are talking about a very large number,” and that his company has worked in this field “for a long period of time”. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard University confirms that organ trafficking is widespread in Israel and believes that there is sufficient evidence to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli crimes.
That Delmonici guy shows up all over the internet, although strangely only in posts about this article and its copies. No worries though. The Palestinian Authority – beneficiary of billions in international assitance, Israel’s partner in peace – has launched an investigation to clear everything up:
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is forming a high-level panel to investigate allegations that the Israeli military “stole organs” from Palestinian detainees, officials said on Thursday. The secretary general of the PA Council of Ministers, Dr Hassan Abu Libdeh, said that the committee has already started work… The ministers of Health, Interior and Foreign Affairs, and senior officials from each ministry are to sit on the commission. The controversy over allegations of organ harvesting began in August when the popular Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published a story… Journalist Donald Bostrom has maintained that in writing the article, he merely wanted to call attention to the Palestinians’ claims in order to call for an investigation into the matter.
“Just airing questions” is another hallmark of conspiracy theories, by the by. Because otherwise theorists might be proven definitively wrong, and then how would they explain their pathological obsessions? Good thing that the PA is on the case.
Your tax dollars at work (h/t: Alex H).
References:
* Articles Which Threaten Israeli Security
* Organ-Harvesting Zionists Trying To Stifle Brave Swedish Expose On IDF Atrocities [MR]
* Palestinian family: We didn’t say organs taken [JPost]
* Aftonbladet editor admits: No evidence [JPost]
* High level PA panel to investigate "organ theft" claims [Ma'an]
Previously:
* Iran PressTV Blows The Lid Off Anti-Obama Birther Conspiracy Theories. Turns Out: Jews.
* “Rehabilitated” Libyan Nutjob: Israel Is “Behind All Of Africa’s Conflicts”
* Top Hamas Cleric: It’s A “War Crime” For UN Textbooks To Mention The Holocaust
