ORIGINAL - Elegant. This morning's breathless AP story all but promises to confirm the organ harvesting blood libel leveled against Israeli Jews last summer. That version had IDF soldiers deliberately killing Palestinians to harvest their organs. This headline screams "Israel harvested organs in '90s without consent." The first few paragraphs of this story all reference that original story. The Berkeley academic behind this story is quoted as saying she leaked the allegations because of that original story.

No wonder the original weasel headline has already morphed into the more explicit "Israel Admits Harvesting Palestinian Organs."

Except it turns out that - at best - the two stories bear only a passing resemblance to each other. One was about IDF soldiers deliberately killing Palestinians for their organs during Cast Lead last year. The other is about pathology work on dead Israelis and Palestinians done through 2000 with what doctors at first thought was family consent. Even this Berkeley Professor, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, admits the two stories are for all intents and purposes distinct. As for the implication in the newest headline about targeting Palestinians, again per Scheper-Hughes: not "by a long shot."

Of course the AP doesn't tell you any of that until the very end, which is where they inform readers that there's still "no evidence" for the Swedish blood libel.

The very end is also where you discover Scheper-Hughes's excuse for publishing what she she must have known would reinforce mouth-breathers quoting from the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. She did it, you see, because of "the symbolism, you know... just in terms of its symbolic weight":

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy... Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

Mainstream media outlets will go out of their way to ignore the obvious religious motivations of the Fort Hood shooter. Wouldn't want to reinforce religious stereotypes! Academics will spin elaborate argumentative edifices - sliding from denial to rationalization to justification - to explain why even discussing domestic terrorism smacks of ulterior motives.