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They left their hearts in Tel Aviv
Lubomyr Prytulak to Israel Asper    Letter 01    10-May-2002

"The family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, was forced to bring suit for the return of missing body parts." � Jonathan Rosenblum
10 May 2002

Israel Asper
Executive Chairman
CanWest Global Communications Corp.
3100 TD Centre, 201 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg MB   R3B 3L7


Israel Asper:

Could Your Readers Have A Little Balance?

In one of your newspapers, The Windsor Star of 09-Apr-2002, p. C10, I read that your father, Leon, was a violinist trained at the Odessa Conservatory and your mother, Cecilia, was a concert pianist.  Your parents seem to have managed their accomplishments in Ukraine in the face of what writer Zev Singer would have us believe was an adverse environment: "Escaping the pogroms of their native Ukraine, Cecilia and Leon Asper came to Canada in the early 1920s."

In order to avoid giving the impression that you are using your newspaper empire to keep alive the nurtured hatreds and hyperbolized grievances of your ancestors, I wonder if you could not introduce some balance to your coverage of Ukrainian-Jewish relations?


Was A Ukrainian Murdered That A Jew Might Live?

For example, a story that is both more recent and more urgent than that of your parents escaping Ukrainian "pogroms," and perhaps more credible as well, and one which I don't think you have permitted your newspaper empire to allude to as yet, is the following:


UKRAINIAN ECHO   07 January 2002     Page 22

A view of the press in Ukraine

  • KHMELNYTSKY

    "Returned from foreign labor ... without his heart."  Underneath such a headline, this newspaper relates that, reduced to despair by extreme material straits, a 39-year-old Khmelnytsky resident took a job in Israel.  However, the terrible news shortly arrived that he had died there of poisoning by a tainted alcoholic beverage (even though all domestic sources insist that he never drank!).  The body of the unfortunate worker was returned to Ukraine for burial.  However, medical experts discovered that he was missing ... his heart!  At the moment, this dreadfully-inhuman affair is being investigated with the help of Interpol....  (Ukrinform, 23 November).


    • Maybe Ukrainians Are Just Creating An Urban Legend?

    There are those who seem ready to disbelieve all reports of organ robbery, and who thus would likely consider the above story of organ robbery, perhaps preceded by murder as well, as an "urban legend," as at However, acknowledging that some organ-robbery stories are likely to be urban legends nevertheless leaves open several possibilities:

    I touch below on several reasons for thinking that the above story of a Jewish organ robbery of a Ukrainian may be true.


    Was a Scotsman Murdered That A Jew Might Live?

    The highly similar fate of Scottish tourist Alastair Sinclair does seem credible:

    Moreover, [Jerusalem District Court Judge Ruth] Orr was well within her rights to be skeptical of the pathological findings of [government pathologist Dr. Yehuda] Hiss, who has long been the subject of controversy as director of Israel Institute for Forensic Medicine, at Abu Kabir.  Last November, a local Tel Aviv paper Ha'ir ran a 12-page expose of Abu Kabir and revealed how the national lab allows medical students to practice on bodies sent there for autopsies, and transfers body parts for transplants without permission from the family of the deceased.

    The family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, was forced to bring suit for the return of missing body parts.

    University of Glasgow pathologists who did an autopsy at the request of Sinclair's family, found that it had been returned without a heart (which they suspect was used for a transplant) and without the crucial bone needed to confirm the claim that he died from hanging.
    Jonathan Rosenblum, Presumed Guilty, Dei'ah veDibur, 07-Feb-2001, originally published in the Jerusalem Post, currently available at www.shemayisrael.com/chareidi/archives5761/beshalach/features.htm

    And because it appears plausible that Alastair Sinclair did not hang himself but was murdered, and because it also appears plausible that the motive for the murder was the harvesting of Alastair Sinclair's heart, the similarity to the Ukrainian story invites us to upgrade the plausibility of the latter at the same time � which is to say, invites us to upgrade the Ukrainian story from possible urban legend to possible murder followed by organ harvesting.


    Three Palestinian Teenagers Murdered By Born-to-Kill Jews, Then Stripped Of Organs

    With respect to the accompanying photograph, one might ask what it would signify about Canadian or American police or military personnel if they boasted that they were "Born to Kill," especially personnel sent into Black or Chicano or Arab or Oriental neighborhoods?  And what it would signify about the government if it allowed them to inscribe this boast on their uniforms?  I assume, also, that as these Jews are openly proud of being Born-to-Kill, that you will find no fault in my calling them Born-to-Kill Jews?

    With respect to the block quote below, you will not fail to notice that the sinister name of Abu Kabir (the location of the Israeli Institute for Forensic Medicine mentioned just above) comes to our attention once again in a story of Palestinian teenagers being the targets of Jewish murder and organ robbery, published incidentally on 09-Jan-2002, just two days after the Ukrainian story above:

    Israel Kills Palestinian Boys, Steals Organs For Transplants

    Teheran Times.com
    1-9-2

    AL-KHALIL (IRNA) � The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago.

    Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament 'Knesset', Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn't deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.

    "I couldn't say for sure that something like that (taking out the organs) didn't happen."

    Teibi said he had received credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli Army in Gaza and the West Bank.

    The Israeli authorities normally detain the bodies of martyred Palestinians for a few days without any explanation.

    The Israeli Army on December 30 killed three Palestinian boys, aged 14-15 near Khan Younis in unclear circumstances.

    The army issued conflicting reports on the killing, while Palestinian sources charged that Israeli troops murdered the three unarmed boys in cold blood.

    The bodies of the three boys were handed over to the Palestinians for burial on 6 January.

    However, shortly before burial, Palestinian medical authorities examined the bodies and found out that the main vital organs were missing from the bodies.

    The Israeli media have nearly completely ignored the affair.

    (IRNA)
    Reproduced on the Jeff Rense web site at www.rense.com/general19/israelkills.htm


    Photographs Need To Be Explained

    Below are two photographs out of several available that lend credibility to the above charges � supposedly Palestinians whose organs have been harvested by Jews.  If the lengthy central incision has some explanation other than organ harvesting, then negative speculation could be discouraged by re-publishing the photographs along with that alternative explanation.  For example, perhaps such an incision results from a standard autopsy, in which case it should be explained why an autopsy was performed in a case where the victim had undergone such massive damage that the cause of death could not have been in doubt, as in the second photograph below:



    www.ummah.com/inewsletter/massacres/palestine/index14.htm

    With regard to the above photographs, one might request from the two sides that the quality of debate be upgraded.  From the accusers, one would like to see names, dates, locations, and particulars attached to each photograph, which at present are lacking.  And as the photographs are on public display at the link immediately above, it behooves the accused to publish some defense, as a posture of nolo contendere encourages the conclusion that no defense is available.


    An Organ Robbery in Beersheba

    The conjecture of Jews harvesting Palestinian organs is further strengthened by the report of an organ robbery below.  Although the nationality of the victim in this case is unspecified, reference to an "anonymous" traffic victim calls to mind the hypothesis that if a deceased person in Jewish-controlled territory in the Middle East cannot be identified, then that person is more likely to be Palestinian than Jewish; and the same if the family of the victim cannot be identified:

    Interestingly, the Israeli Anatomy and Pathology Law (1953) allows for "using part of a corpse when it is needed to save the life of a person" without any consent.  This law has very rarely been used and on one celebrated occasion may have brought more damage than benefit.  On June 19, 1993, a heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys were harvested from an anonymous traffic accident victim in Beersheba and transplanted in five patients in Israel.  After all attempts to identify the family failed, the hospital staff harvested the organs without consent.  This person was not carrying a donor card.  The story was described on the front pages of the daily newspapers as a case of "organ robbery," and public response was so unfavorable that no similar attempts have been made since.
    Ethical Issues in Organ Transplantation in Israel by Gershon B. Grunfeld, Ph.D., Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, P.O.B. 9649, 31096 Haifa, ISRAEL, on University of Tsukuba web site at www.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/EJ66/EJ66O.html


    Seven-Year-Old Palestinian Boy Murdered By Born-To-Kill Jews, Then Stripped Of Organs

    That Jews allocated expensive resources to save "Israeli-Arab teenagers" is one detail that does not ring true below, and if true in this one instance, might have been implemented so as to justify and strengthen the precedent of harvesting Palestinian organs, but with the intention of channeling later supply to Jews � a hypothesis that could be evaluated by an examination of the number of organs that Israel has been allocating to Jews and Arabs respectively, should such data ever be released.  A question called to mind by the discussion of the influence of Jewish religion on organ transplant policy at the bottom of the present letter is whether in the entire history of Israel, a Jewish organ has ever been transplanted into a non-Jew?

    Furthermore, the above claim of a Ukrainian victim of Jewish organ-harvesting is considerably reinforced by the admission below that Gastarbeiter (foreign worker) donors constitute nearly half of all donors, with the claim that family permission for organ harvesting is obtained (in all cases, apparently) being a second detail that does not quite ring true.  Certainly permission being granted "by telephone" carries an air of informality, and places an obstacle in the path of any investigator attempting to verify that family permission had in fact been given.  Finally, it must be kept in mind that the bulk of Jewish transplants are conducted outside Israel, as will be documented in the next section; the small numbers cited in the box quote immediately below fail to convey the volume of activity:

    During the first ten months of the year, 26 donors contributed to 91 recipients.  The donors included traffic-accident fatalities, operating-room deaths, and seven-year-old Ali Jawarish of Bethlehem, accidentally shot by IDF soldiers during riots outside Rachel�s Tomb.  He was pronounced brain-dead on Nov. 15; his organs were transplanted into three Israeli-Arab teenagers the next day.  Nearly half the donors during the first six months of 1997 were gastarbeiter whose families overseas gave their consent by telephone � sometimes in return for Health Ministry funding to fly the corpse home.
    Organ Transplants and Donations, ISRAEL YEARBOOK and ALMANAC, 1998 www.iyba.co.il/98/organs.htm

    That deaths among Gastarbeiter are so commonplace, and Gastarbeiter family permission to harvest organs is so dependable, that Gastarbeiter constitute nearly half of all organ donors is a claim that cries out for investigation � the suspicion being aroused that Jews murder Gastarbeiter in order to harvest their organs, and fall short of Western standards as to what constitutes obtaining family permission as well.  For organs that may be worth millions of dollars, offering families only the compensation of flying what remains of a Gastarbeiter body back home sounds like a minor injustice added to a major one.


    Israel Is A World Leader In Illegal Organ Trafficking, The Surviving-Donar Variety Being Best Documented

    As one cannot always rob, one sometimes is reduced to purchasing:

    Israel has recently become something of a pariah in the transplant world.  Without a strong culture of organ donation and under the pressure of angry transplant candidates, the Ministry of Health has refused to crack down on the country�s multi-million dollar business in transplant tourism that arranges junkets from dialysis clinics in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to medical centres in Europe and the United States.

    "Why should we Israelis be made to travel to third world clinics to get the kidneys we need to survive from the bodies of peasants, soldiers, or guest workers who may be in worse physical shape than ourselves?" a 71-year-old "kidney buyer" from Tel Aviv asked me rhetorically.  "Organs should be seen as a human, not as a national resource."  It was good to see "Avirham," an elderly gentleman, alive and happy with his revitalizing 22-year-old "peasant" kidney.  And his living donor?  "A peasant, without anything!" he replied.  "Do you have any idea what $1,000, let alone $5,000 means in the life of a peasant?"

    For most bio-ethicists, the "slippery slope" in transplant medicine begins with the emergence of a black market in organs and tissue sales.  For the anthropologist, it emerges much earlier: the first time a frail and ailing human looks at another living person and realizes that inside that other body is something that can prolong his or her life.  The desire is articulated: "I want that; I need that even more than you."  In terms of transplants, the kidney has emerged as the ultimate fetish, promising to satisfy the most basic of human desires � that for life, vitality and élan.

    The sale of human organs and tissues requires that certain disadvantaged individuals and populations have been reduced to the role of "suppliers."  It is a scenario in which bodies are dismembered, transported, processed and sold in the interests of a more socially advantaged population of organ and tissue receivers.  I use the word "fetish" advisedly to conjure up the displaced magical energy that is invested in the strangely animate kidney.  Avirham, who flew from Jerusalem to Georgia for his kidney, explained why he would never tolerate a donation from a corpse: "That kidney is practically dead.  It was probably pinned down under the wheels of a car for several hours...  I was able to see my donor.  He was young, healthy, strong.  Just what I was hoping for."
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes, The Organ of Last Resort, UNESCO, The Courier, July/August 2001 www.unesco.org/courier/2001_07/uk/doss34.htm

    Investigative journalism in Turkey uncovers Jewish plundering of Turkish organs:

    Ugur Dündar, Haluk Sahin, and M. Ali Önel of Kanal D's ARENA, Hürriyet Production, Turkey

    �The International Transplant Mafia,� broadcast in two installments in 1997, exposed a human organ black-market network linking Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Israel.  An Istanbul man, struggling to raise two young children, had agreed to sell one of his kidneys for $8,000 U.S. dollars but later contacted Arena, Turkey's lead investigative TV program, fearing that more than a kidney might be lost.  An Arena reporter with a hidden camera,
    �I had to do something, you know, to save the kids. That meant I had to give a part of body. God help anyone from making such a decision. It was awful.� � Ramazan, 27-year-old father of two, Arena
    posing as the donor's friend, accompanied him over the next several days to meetings with organ brokers and a Turkish surgeon.  The operation was aborted at the last minute, when the Arena crew entered the hospital, cameras rolling.  The surgeon was denounced by the country's medical board and was later tried, but Arena discovered another syndicate operating several months later in another city.  This time posing as the donor, an Arena reporter met with an organ broker and agreed to sell his kidney for $5,000.  A trip to the Czech Republic for the operation fell apart after Arena alerted police.  The man confessed he was paid to arrange kidney transplants by his boss in Israel, where Arena reporters later unsuccessfully searched for the syndicate boss.  Instead, they found the president of an association of patients waiting for kidney transplants, who said 50 Israelis had been saved in the last year by Turkish kidneys.

    1998 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Award Finalists www.icij.org/about/finalists.html

    Moshe Tati
    Organ Buyer Moshe Tati
    Excerpts below from Michael Finkel writing in the New York Times Magazine

    The three headings below were not in the original:

    Organ Buyer Moshe Tati

    Moshe was 43 years old, and he was dying, and not one of his family members was a suitable match for a kidney donation.  So he called the broker.

    Moshe lives in Israel, which happens to be one of the more active nations in the international organ-trafficking market.  The market, which is completely illegal, is so complex and well organized that a single transaction often crosses three continents: a broker from Los Angeles, say, matches an Italian with kidney failure to a seller in Jordan, for surgery in Istanbul.  [...]

    The sale of human organs, whether from a living person or a cadaver, is against the law in virtually every country (Iran is perhaps the only exception) and has been condemned by all of the world's medical associations.  [...]

    Yet in Israel and a handful of other nations, including India, Turkey, China, Russia and Iraq, organ sales are conducted with only a scant nod toward secrecy.  In Israel, there is even tacit government acceptance of the practice � the national health-insurance program covers part, and sometimes all, of the cost of brokered transplants.  [...]

    Paying for an organ has become so routine in Israel that there have been instances in which a patient has elected not to accept the offer of a kidney donation from a well-matched relative.  "Why risk harm to a family member?" one patient told me.  Instead, these patients have decided that purchasing a kidney from someone they've never met � in almost all cases someone who is impoverished and living in a foreign land � is a far more palatable option.

    I can get you a kidney immediately," said the broker whom Moshe Tati called.  "All I need is the money."  Then he quoted a price: $145,000, cash, paid in advance.  [...]

    Desire for a living donor is another reason why dialysis patients often prefer to purchase a kidney and circumvent national programs, where legally transplanted organs are almost always from cadavers.  An Israeli kidney buyer named Avriham, who used the same broker as Moshe Tati and traveled to Eastern Europe, described this notion in his own terms: "Why should I wait years just to have a kidney from someone who was in a car accident, pinned in his car for hours, then in miserable condition in the I.C.U. for days, and only then, after all that trauma, have part of him put inside me?  That organ is not going to be any good!  Or, worse, I could get the organ of an elderly person, a person who died of a stroke or an aneurysm � that kidney is all used up!  It's better to take a kidney from a healthy young man who can also benefit from the money.  Where I went, families were so poor they didn't even have bread to eat.  The money I gave was a gift equal to the gift I received.  I insisted on seeing my donor.  He was young and very healthy, very strong.  It was perfect, just what I was hoping for.  A dream kidney."  [...]

    When Moshe's plane landed in Istanbul, there was no need to clear customs, no one asking for passports.  "Everything was already taken care of," Moshe says.  "The organization was like clockwork."  Moshe and the other three patients were driven to a hospital � An old hospital," Moshe says, "not modern, but very clean" � and their family and friends were taken to a hotel.  [...]

    "As I was being prepared for surgery," Moshe says, "I saw the man who was giving me his kidney.  I just glimpsed him briefly.  He was in an operating room across from me.  We never spoke; when I saw him, he was already asleep, at the beginning of his surgery.  [...]

    Drawbacks of Selling Off One's Body Piecemeal

    Scheper-Hughes remains unconvinced that selling a kidney is actually a low-risk activity.  She says she feels that the chief tenet of the Hippocratic Oath � do no harm � is being violated.  "In these deals you are certainly harming someone else," she says.  "You are harming the sellers."  The argument that the slight harm to the sellers is more than offset by the lifesaving potential on the other end of the transaction is also troubling to Scheper-Hughes.  "I call this 'increasing the net good,'" she says.  "Is this really the kind of world we want to live in � one based on utilitarian ethics in which net gain to one relatively privileged population allows them to claim property rights over the bodies of the disadvantaged?"

    Further, she points out, every study demonstrating that kidney donation does not compromise health has been conducted in a wealthy nation.  "It is not exactly clear that poor people can really live safely with one kidney," she says.  People who sell their kidneys, she adds, usually live in abject conditions and face greater-than-average threats to their health, including poor diets, low-quality drinking water and increased risk of infectious disease, all of which can easily compromise the remaining kidney.

    The actual kidney-removal surgery may also not be as gentle as advertised.  Even Michael Friedlaender admits that removal surgery is a more painful procedure than transplantation.  After a surgeon has carved through skin, fat and several layers of muscle, getting at a kidney sometimes necessitates the partial extraction of the 12th rib.  Short-term complications have been documented in nearly one in five kidney-donation surgeries.  [...]

    There is further concern about the notion that sellers are making an autonomous choice.  Lawrence Cohen, an associate professor of medical anthropology at Berkeley and the other founder of Organs Watch, has done much of his fieldwork in India.  He recently studied 30 kidney sellers in the city of Chennai.  Twenty-seven of them were women.  Some of their husbands, Cohen learned, made it clear that if the men had to do heavy labor, it was only fair that the women contribute to the family income by selling a kidney.  Cohen observed that in none of the cases did selling an organ significantly improve the family's fortunes in the long run.  "If only I had three kidneys," one of the women told Cohen, "then I could sell two and things might be better."

    "Nobody seems concerned about the sellers," Scheper-Hughes says.  "The buyers are supported by doctors, but no one represents the sellers.  Nobody solicits their opinions.  In this market, they have become an invisible population.  Someone needs to listen to them.  What do they have to say?"  [...]

    Organ Seller Mehmet Piskin

    The surgery lasted a little less than three hours.  "When I woke up I had severe pain in my right side," Mehmet recalls.  "I told the doctor about the pain and he gave me a shot.  [...]

    Mehmet, meanwhile, has never regained his health.  It has been four years since the operation.  "I'm not the same person," he says.  "I swell up like a pregnant woman.  I can't sleep.  I have not been able to work; my health has not allowed it.  [...]  The people of this village, they look down on me because of what I've done.  I feel helpless."

    An American surgeon, after being told of Mehmet's symptoms, suggested that Mehmet might suffer either from nerve-entrapment syndrome � in which a nerve was mistakenly caught in one of his internal sutures � or a type of hernia that can result if one of the layers of abdominal muscle the surgeon sliced through did not heal properly.  Mehmet has not gone to see a doctor about his pain.  He can't.  All of the money from the operation is gone.  Mehmet's wife is the family's sole wage earner.  [...]

    "Everything is worse now than before," Sebnem says.  "Mehmet was a healthy person, and now he is like this.  Nothing is right.  [...]  We've basically been reduced to begging."
    Michael Finkel, This Little Kidney Went to Market, New York Times Magazine, 27-May-2001 www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anderson/introethics/NYTimes_Organ_buying.htm

    The BBC report below includes description of young Moldovan engineer Sergei Timms who had a kidney stolen in Turkey, apparently for Jewish use, in gruesome, urban-legend style.  Additional detail concerning this same incident is available at www.lifeissues.net/related/organ/news/010801-06.html which ends with Sergei's philosophical resignation: "What can I say to the Israeli who got my kidney?" Sergei said.  "Even though they got it through deceit, what is done is done.  Let him be healthy, but let it be on his conscience."

    MOLDOVA/TURKEY/ISRAEL � ORGAN TRADE

    Reporter: Sue Lloyd Roberts (BBC)

    LEAD STORY
    EPISODE 5
    SERIES 11 - 01-Aug-2001

    Synopsis:
    The Moldovan village of Minghia has the dubious distinction of being the world's best source of human kidneys.  At least 14 young men from the village have sold one of their kidneys in an extensive trade across three countries.  In an extraordinary investigation the BBC's Sue Lloyd Roberts even discovers one case of a young engineer who had his kidney stolen.  Lured to Istanbul on the promise of work, he was told the job had evaporated but he could earn his return fare by selling blood.  When he woke from the anaesthetic he had a major scar and an empty feeling in his left side.  He was told he could either accept the $3000 for his kidney (the going rate for Moldovan kidneys) or find his own way out of the predicament.

    "I was furious, it was a fait accompli" Sergei Timms

    In Turkey, Sue discovers that the surgeon responsible for the illegal trade is well known to the authorities, having been repeatedly exposed on Turkish TV, but seems to be continuing his trade with impunity.  Most of the recipients of the kidneys are Israelis because of the very low level of [organ] donations there.  From the health authorities in Israel we learn that the practice is now so widespread that insurance companies, subsidised by the Government, are funding these illegal transplants.  It's a shocking indictment of the ways supply and demand can distort the law and ethics.  For poor Moldovan villagers $3,000 may be their only chance of a reasonable future, for Israelis on dialysis $60,000 is a cheap price to get back their lives.  Meanwhile fortunes are being made by agents, middlemen and surgeons feeding this demand.  The organ trade is illegal in all three countries but the police and health authorities are either unwilling or unable to combat the pressures of these disturbing market realities.
    Australia Broadcasting Corporation Online, 01-Aug-2001 www.abc.net.au/foreign/2001/ep5-11.htm

    The excerpts below give some idea of the volume of the trade, and reveal that live donors may give up not only a kidney, but also corneas and patches of skin:

    HEALTH: Israeli Link In Estonian 'Human Kidneys For Sale' Scam

    By Andrei Ivanov

    MOSCOW, Feb 20 (IPS) � The commercial trade in human body parts is no longer confined to the poorer developing countries, it seems � Eastern and Central Europe is now becoming a source of cheap human kidneys and other organs for the booming transplant industry.

    Investigations are continuing in Tallinn following revelations in January that two Israeli doctors performed kidney transplants on six Israeli nationals in Tallinn using kidneys donated from natives of Romania, Moldova and Russia.

    The surgery was organised in Estonia because transplantation of organs is legally prohibited in Israel without a special permission of the health minister unless the donor is a relative of the patient.  The Israeli surgeons said the donors had given their kidneys voluntarily and free of charge.

    However Estonian police have launched criminal proceedings against the surgeons, the patients and the donors on the grounds that they concealed the aim of their visit in their visa applications.  [...]

    Andrus Maesalu, head doctor at Tallinn's Central Hospital where the operations were carried out, says they were performed in Estonia because the hospital service is cheaper.  He said the Israelis had told doctors at the hospital the donors were relatives of the recipients.

    However, the same newspaper quoted one of the donors, a 37-year- old resident of Kingissepp, Russia, as saying he was not a relative of any of the recipients.  [...]

    According to Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper, however, each kidney operation cost the patient 150,000 dollars.  Chaim Efraima, an adviser with the Priaso sponsorship company which organised the kidney transplant operations, says his company charged 160,000 dollars for each operation.  [...]

    Israeli Public Health Ministry statistics show that number of Israelis waiting for kidneys is increasing, while the number of kidney transplant operations has remained relatively small.

    In 1995 only 21 percent of patients needing a kidney received one and this fell to 15 percent in 1996.  At present there are 900 persons on the list of patients waiting for a kidney transplant operation in Israel and the list is growing longer every day.  [...]

    The prices for organs taken from live patients run about 4,425 dollars for a cornea, 55 dollars for a patch of skin, and 1,000-2,000 dollars for a kidney, according to researchers into the trade.

    Inter Press Service www.oneworld.org/ips2/feb98/transplants.html


    The Relation Between Organ Trafficking And Child Trafficking

    Although documentation that children are trafficked for their organs does not appear to be currently available on the Internet, suspicions have been raised in the case of Brazil, and alarm from the direction of Romania.

    As for the suspicions concerning Brazil:

    In all, the organ stealing rumor has its basis in poor peoples' perceptions, grounded in a social and bio-medical reality, that their bodies and those of their children might be worth more dead than alive to the rich and the powerful.  They can all too easily imagine that their bodies, and the bodies of their young children, may be eyed longingly by those with money.  As they envision it, organ exchange proceeds from the bodies of the young, the poor and the beautiful to the bodies of the old, the rich, and the ugly, and from the poor in the South to the rich in the North: Americans, Germans, Italians, Japanese and Israelis in particular.  [...]

    Finally, the child and organ stealing rumor reflects unscrupulous practices of international adoption.  In the shantytowns of Brazil I encountered several cases of coerced adoption and (in 1990 alone) two cases of child stealing by wealthy "patrons."  Each year nearly 1,500 children leave Brazil, legally, to live with adoptive parents in Europe, the United States, and Israel.  But if one adds the clandestine traffic in babies that relies on false documents and bureaucratic corruption in Brazil and abroad, exploiting the ignorance and the powerlessness of poor women, the number of children leaving Brazil has been estimated at 3,000 a year, or roughly 50 babies a week.

    The lively market in "spare babies" for international adoption is often confused with the lively market in "spare parts" for international transplant surgery.  As poor people in shantytowns see it, the ring of organ exchange proceeds from the bodies of the young, the poor, and the beautiful to the bodies of the old, the rich, and the ugly, and from poor nations in the South to rich nations in the North.  In the midst of the black market for organs and babies, poor people can hardly be blamed for thinking that their babies are wanted as much dead and for their organs as for their lives.  [...]

    Between 1985-1990 about 2,000 children have entered Israel from Brazil in a questionable manner.
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/organswatch/pages/theftoflife2.html (footnote numbers removed)

    And as for the alarm from the direction of Romania:

    Romania probes Israeli adoption agency link in organ trafficking

    By Ran Reznick

    Romanian authorities are looking into possible links between Israeli adoption agencies and an illegal global conspiracy to sell organs for transplants.

    The Romanian Embassy in Israel has asked for, and received from the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, a list of all children born in Romania who have been brought to Israel for adoption in recent years.  The Romanian officials are trying to ascertain if all such children arrived in Israel with all organs in their bodies.  [...]

    Responding to complaints and rumors, Romanian authorities have taken the highly unusual step in the past year of withholding authorization for the adoption of 16 Romanian babies destined for Israeli parents.  This delay has been enforced although the Israeli couples have paid $20,000 each to adopt the infants, and have already become acquainted with the babies in the foster homes and institutions where they are being held.  Romanian authorities insist they will not give the go ahead for the adoptions until inquiries about possible wrong-doing are completed.
    Ha'aretz, 12-Dec-2001 www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=105107&sw=Romania

    The summary below concerns Israeli child trafficking mainly during the years 1948-1954, and thus at a time when organ transplantation was not yet feasible, so that this particular batch of stolen children cannot be suspected of having been trafficked so that their organs could be transplanted.

    These trafficked children of earlier years are relevant to our present discussion, however, in disclosing a culture of child trafficking existing alongside the culture of organ trafficking that we have been discussing at length above.  The two coexisting together within one culture must lead to the hypothesis that they may sometimes overlap, which is to say must lead to the hypothesis that a culture that traffics both children and organs is only one step removed from becoming a culture that traffics children for their organs.

    Although the issue of the missing Yemenite and other Jewish children is well known in Israel, I understand that it is virtually unknown abroad.

    This issue involves thousands of children who were taken, sometimes forcably, from their biological parents while in hospitals or childcare homes, then sold both in Israel and abroad for substantial sums (that varied from case to case), or given out for adoption, while their parents were told that the children had died.  In most cases, when the parents asked about the cause of death or requested a death certificate or other documentation confirming the death of their children, they were ignored and their requests went unanswered.

    They never saw a body.  In most cases, not even a burial spot was seen.  In a few cases, however, graves were shown to the families.  Some of those graves, later on, were dug up by parents who did not believe that their beloved, healthy child truly died overnight.  The graves were found empty.

    These activities were carried out by doctors, nurses, social workers and other members of the Israeli Establishment at that time.  I have heard many "moral" justifications given for taking these children from their parents.  I do not believe any are legitimate.  It seems to me that the real reason for the kidnapping of the children was money.  People in positions of power at the time that the State of Israel was established profited from the abduction and sale of children from poor immigrant families.

    This practice continued on at least into the early 1960s.  Some say that it still continues, although on a much smaller scale.

    One common misconception is that these abuses were practiced against Yemenite Jews alone.  While researching this issue I have concluded that the victims also included immigrant Jews from Tunis, Spain, Morocco, Lybia, Iraq, Iran, and Belgium, to name a few countries.  In most cases, the immigrants came from Middle Eastern countries.

    The number of kidnapped children has been estimated at around 2,400 by the official investigating committee.  When Rabbi Uzi Meshullam was still collecting evidence, he gathered the names of 4,500 children.  I believe that the real number is much larger than that.  I have found that many families never reported the disappearance of a child.  I estimate that approximately 10,000 children were kidnapped and sold, and I would not be surprised if the real number is higher.
    Yechiel A. Mann, Research Associate of Israel Resource News Agency, The Case of the Missing Children: Discovering the Fate of Thousands of Jewish Children Who Disappeared in Israel Between 1948 and 1954, Israel Resource Review, 02-Jun-1998 israelbehindthenews.com/Archives/Jun-02.html

    The story told by Yona Hovera below presents heart-rending detail of a single one of the thousands of baby kidnappings, and brings to mind that a corollary of learning to exploit the out-group as subhumans is that the habits of exploitation will, sooner or later, be discovered being applied to the in-group as well:

    "One day, I arrived to nurse my daughter and they told me: 'You can't nurse her today.  She has pneumonia'.  I was very surprised, since the child was completely healthy, but they said she needs to be sent to the Pardes Hannah Hospital, for three days.  I told them I will go consult my husband and will be right back.  We lived about five meters away from the baby ward.  Three minutes later, I arrived, with my husband, but they told us: 'They already took her'.  Three days later, a man arrived, announcing that Masha Hovera had died.  My husband asked that they bury her.  They told him: 'You are her father?  She has died.  Sign here'.  He said: 'I'm not signing.  I want to see a body and bury it'.  They told him: 'They buried her yesterday, along with another five children'.  My husband was in shock.  He asked: 'Are we in Israel or in Germany'?  He asked and begged to see the grave, and they did not let him.  He said: 'I am not signing, nor mourning'.  Every day, I would go to the manager's office, and beg that they show me where my daughter was buried.  A few days later, the manager told me: 'Go, there is a room downstairs, they will give you your child, but do not touch her.  She will be given to you, wrapped up, and you return her to the grave'.  I went, and saw a strange package, that didn't look like a dead child to me.  I felt I was being fooled.  I said to myself, I'll open it, maybe it's a dead cat.  I removed a rag, and another rag, until I reached the last one, and found nothing.  Only rags.  I started to cry: 'Why did you give me rags?', the manager told me: 'We wanted to calm you down, we didn't know you were so smart'...."

    To this very day, they do not know of their child's fate.
    Yechiel A. Mann, Research Associate of Israel Resource News Agency, The Case of the Missing Children: Discovering the Fate of Thousands of Jewish Children Who Disappeared in Israel Between 1948 and 1954, Israel Resource Review, 02-Jun-1998 israelbehindthenews.com/Archives/mann2.htm

    A question which the above narrative calls to mind is that if the complaints of Jewish parents who have had their baby stolen can be met with such callous disregard, then with what regard might we expect the complaints of Palestinian parents to be met in a similar situation?

    Among the valuable pieces of information cited by Yechiel A. Mann is that Dr. Yehuda Hiss, implicated higher above in organ trafficking at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir (also written Abu-Kbir), appeared to contribute to a cover-up of the Israeli child trafficking scandal.  Although the organs of children in 1948-1954 could not have been harvested for transplanting, there nevertheless is talk of medical experiments on children at possibly this same institute, and talk of bodies not being released or made available for examination, and other gruesome details:

    [Ami] Chovav was interviewed concerning the allegations that were current then, that medical experiments were conducted on Yemenite children hospitalized during the 1950s.  [...]

    One of the reasons claimed by Chovav that a body was never seen and a grave site was not specified in many of the cases is, to quote, "...  The child that died would be sent to the institute of pathology.  Many were sent.  It was for a humanitarian cause, for advancing medical research.  I do not see anything wrong with that at all."  When he was asked about permission from the family to do such a thing, he answered "In many of the cases, they did not know who the child belonged to, or where it came from.  When there was a family, they didn't want to show it the body.

    "Once the autopsy was completed, the body would be completely dismembered.  Were they supposed to show that to a religious parent?  The refrigeration compartment would eventually fill up, and then they called the Chevera Kadisha to come and bury all the body parts."  He added, regarding the pathological institute not telling the parents anything, "I asked them.  They said it wasn't their job, it was the hospital's job.  But the hospital did not always know who the child belonged to...."

    One example of a reason for this that was given by Chovav: "In one case, the children were taken in the ambulance in cardboard boxes, since they weren't going to put babies on stretchers.  On that specific trip, they put notes with the children's names on top of the boxes.  The wind blew all the notes away.  That is how the children were brought to the hospital."
    Yechiel A. Mann, Research Associate of Israel Resource News Agency, The Case of the Missing Children: Discovering the Fate of Thousands of Jewish Children Who Disappeared in Israel Between 1948 and 1954, Israel Resource Review, 02-Jun-1998 israelbehindthenews.com/Archives/mann2.htm


    Jewish Fundamentalists Give A Green Light To Murder For Organ Acquisition

    The passage quoted below discloses

    1. that religious opposition may be the chief reason that Israeli Jews have a low rate of organ donation, and

    2. that some Jewish thinking condones murder of non-Jews for any of several purposes, among which is the harvesting of non-Jewish organs for use by Jews.

    In view of the information in the present letter, and particularly in the quotation below, it may be wondered what inhibitions the Jewish soldiers pictured here might feel about delivering the Palestinians that they seize to an organ-harvesting facility, or what finder fees they may be paid for doing so.

    Also of interest would be to see photographs of the people sacrificed for their organs juxtaposed with photographs of those who receive those same organs.



    In 1994 Rabbi [Yehoshua] Sheinberger [...] met with senior physicians from the Israel Transplants Association and discussed with them the Jewish religious prohibition on organ donations.  In Israel Haredi Jews refuse organ transplants from their and/or their relatives' corpses.  On this issue the Haredi position influences many people for superstitious as well as religious reasons.  Organ transplants in Israel are thus difficult to arrange.  Surgeons frequently request Haredi rabbis to appeal to their followers to agree to organ transplants from corpses of their relatives in order to save lives.  The surgeons' argument is based upon the Jewish religious law giving priority to saving Jewish lives.  In this discussion Rabbi Sheinberger put the condition that only a Haredi rabbi could authorize such transplants.  He explained: "Jewish religious law states that it is forbidden to transplant Jewish organs into either non-Jews or Jews who are not pious.  It is obvious that it is prohibited under any circumstances to transplant Jewish organs into Arabs, all of whom hate Jews."  Rabbi Sheinberger, when asked for his definition of a Jew who is not pious, replied that a rabbi must determine the status of every Jew.  Sheinberger's request caused a huge commotion and was rejected.

    Many non-Haredi rabbis allow an organ of a non-Jew to be transplanted into a body of a Jew in order to save the life of the Jew.  They, however, oppose the transplant of an organ from a Jew into the body of a non-Jew.  Some important rabbis go much further in discussing and ruling about differences between Jews and non-Jews on medical matters.  Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential member of the Habad movement and the head of a yeshiva near Nablus [...] opined in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week article, reproduced in Haaretz that same day: "If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God.  Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA."  Rabbi Ginsburgh drew two conclusions from this statement: "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him?  The Torah would probably permit that.  Jewish life has an infinite value.  There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life."  It is noteworthy that Rabbi Ginsburgh is one of the authors of a book lauding Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarch's Cave murderer.  In that book Ginsburgh contributed a chapter in which he wrote that a Jew's killing non-Jews does not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion and that killing of innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue.  No influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh's statements; most Israeli politicians have remained silent; some Israeli politicians have openly supported him.
    Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London and Sterling Virginia, 1999, pp. 42-43 (blue emphasis added).


    Four Things You Might Consider Doing

    (1)  Balance your coverage of Ukrainian-Jewish relations

    Your relying on the folk legends of your ancestors to renew accusations of Ukrainian "pogroms" in the newspapers under your control, while at the same time ignoring stories such as that of the Ukrainian guest worker who died under mysterious circumstances and was discovered to be missing his heart, paints a distorted picture of the nature of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

    A truer picture is that Ukrainians have historically played a role toward Jews similar to the one Palestinians are playing today, which is to say that Ukrainians have been exploited and oppressed and dispossessed, and have occasionally staged rebellions in an attempt to regain their freedom, rebellions which your ancestors chose to label "pogroms," and rebellions resembling those in the Middle East today which you prefer to label "terrorism."

    Reduced coverage in your newspapers of Ukrainian "pogroms" and increased coverage of Jewish organ trafficking would serve to project a more accurate impression of both historical and contemporary realities.

    (2)  Warn guest workers, tourists, and expectant mothers

    You might consider using your newspaper empire to warn Gastarbeiter in Israel that they stand in danger of losing their lives, the more so if they are young and healthy.

    Similarly, you might caution a young and healthy and non-Jewish tourist, especially one travelling alone, that organ-hungry Israel is capable of asking him to follow in the footsteps of Scottish tourist Alastair Sinclair, and you might caution such a tourist more particularly to avoid venturing alone on a tour of an organ-harvesting facility such as the one at Abu Kabir.

    In the case both of Gastarbeiter and tourists, your newspapers could recommend that the movie Coma be viewed in the course of weighing the decision to come to Israel in the first place.

    Pregnant women also might be warned that giving birth in Israel could be followed by reports that their apparently-healthy baby had died, along with a failure to produce a body.

    (3) Help the United States break free of its repetition compulsion

    The United States repeatedly makes the mistake of creating institutions that are inherently evil, that grow strong, and that then need to be destroyed, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, and of the Taliban, offering current examples.  Israel has today emerged as by far the biggest, and by far the most dangerous, product of this same mistake.

    Today's Israel was created largely by the United States.  It was evil from its inception and has since degenerated into barbarism.  Its misbehavior is destabilizing not just the Middle East but the whole world.  And yet the United States cannot at this point implement its habitual remedy of bombing it into rubble because Israel has acquired hundreds of nuclear weapons and because Jews exercise strong influence over the press and over the American government.

    Thus, you might consider helping the United States to acknowledge its recurring mistake, and to recognize that the first step in correcting the current manifestation is to divest Israel of its nuclear arsenal.

    (4) Re-activate Jewish mechanisms of self-correction

    Israel's regression into barbarism and savagery was made possible, or rather was rendered inevitable, by the de-activation of mechanisms of self-correction within Jewish culture.  Jewish influence over the press, and the use of this influence to inhibit criticism of Jews, is the leading instance of such a de-activation of a mechanism of self-correction.

    A current example of self-correction activated in the service of non-Jews is the evident Catholic effort to correct its sinning clergy, but with no comparable self-correction evident among Jews, even when the Jewish clergy stands in much greater need of correction, as I documented in my letter to Ezra Levant, titled Good Priests, Bad Rabbis, of 15-Apr-2002.

    Anyone who views the Catholic clergy being pilloried for its sins, even when some of these sins are feebly documented, while the Jewish clergy is granted comparative impunity for its more egregious and better documented sins � anyone who views this differential treatment, I say � as a victory for Jews is mistaken, for in fact it is a stunning Jewish defeat because impunity is a cancer and a curse.  It is, then, particularly the work of media lords like yourself that serves to drag the Jewish people down.

    From this point of view, the greatest service that you or anybody can perform for the Jewish people is to hold them not to a lower standard than the rest of mankind, but to the same standard; is to give them not the curse of immunity from criticism, but the blessing of criticism as severe as that given to others; is to give them not the disease of impunity for their crimes, but the health of full punishment.

    What the Jewish people need in order to be saved, in other words, is less of the sort of writing that you publish in your newspapers, and more of the sort that I publish on the Internet.  As this perspective is increasingly adopted, posterity will come to ask who has injured Jews most, and who has assisted them most, and according to this criterion will mark your work as having served to undermine Judaism, and will mark my work as having served to reinforce it.

    As it is possible that in your reading of the present letter, the accusation of anti-Semitism will have intruded itself into your thoughts, I ask you to remember that in an impartial evaluation of our respective effects upon the Jewish people, it is likely to be concluded that it is you � together with the Born-to-Kill members of Jewish intelligence and police and armed forces units that your newspapers defend � who weaken the Jewish people, and thus that it is you who play the role of anti-Semite.




    Lubomyr Prytulak

    ADDED 19-FEB-2005:

    Kidney trade probe moves to Israel

    February 18, 2005

    By Monica Laganparsad

    Investigators and prosecutors probing an international kidney trade syndicate have been given a six-month postponement to carry out investigations in Israel.

    South African authorities said their trip to Israel could broaden their investigations and more suspects could be arrested.

    The kidney trade syndicate allegedly recruited poor Brazilians and Israelis and paid them up to $10 000 (about R60 000) to fly to South Africa and donate a kidney.  The recipients were Israelis who paid up to $120 000 (about R724 000) for the organs.

    On Tuesday, St Augustine's Hospital kidney specialist Jeff Kallmeyer, Netcare transplant staffers Lindy Dickson and Melani Azor and English/Hebrew interpreter Samuel Ziegler appeared in the Durban Magistrate's Court.

    They have been charged with up to 76 contraventions of the Human Tissues Act, which outlaws the sale of human organs.

    State advocate Hansraj Cheetenal said the proposed trip to Israel could broaden the investigation in that there could be other suspects.

    Advocate Jimmy Howse, representing Kallmeyer, opposed the application and asked the State to withdraw charges pending the outcome of the investigation.

    "Charges like this always have a devastating effect on professional people.  Not only is it an embarrassment for him but it has hugely affected his practice," said Howse.

    He said the broader investigation in Israel was likely to "open a new can of worms" that would delay investigations further.

    Counsel for Kallmeyer's co-accused also opposed the State's application.

    Magistrate E Le Grange granted the lengthy adjournment, adding that it was a final postponement for further investigation.

    The matter was adjourned to August 16.

    Pretorian News at www.pretorianews.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=665&fArticleId=2415995

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