Just who do you think you are?

Do you wonder about the organ stealing stories coming out since the New Jersey scandal broke? One thing is for sure, this story draws out the long sharp claws.

Boström's article, first to appear in English on Haaretz.com, makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.

"Now that [the story] has once again risen to the surface, I wanted to point out the link [to the New Jersey affair] and the fact that there needs to be an investigation of the claims," Boström said.

Boström said he had offered the story to another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, which turned it down "with no explanation."

The reporter said Aftonbladet, the most popular evening tabloid in Sweden, published the article without making any editorial changes. Asa Linderborg, an editor of the newspaper's culture section which printed the story, told Haaretz that the publication "stands behind the demand for an international inquiry." "We had many discussions on whether to publish the article or not, and to the best of my knowledge, there are no facts there that are incorrect," Linderborg said.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday blasted the article, calling it anti-Semitic "hate porn". "This article has clear elements of medieval blood libels against Jews," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said of Monday's story in Aftonbladet. Accusing the tabloid of encouraging hate crimes, he said: "This is intolerable."

OK, so on one side we have a paper publishing claims after checking them and finding no evidence that the claims are incorrect. Due to the appalling nature of the claims, the Swedish editors stand behind the demand for an international inquiry.

In Response, they are accused by an Israeli spokesman of publishing anti-semitic hate porn and medieval blood libels against Jews, and encouraging hate crimes.

Hmm. No, sorry, the Swedish editors have stated clearly that they call for an international inquiry.

So to recap, a call for an international inquiry = anti-semitic hate porn. Actually no. Not the same. Not in reality. Maybe in some people's minds that is the same thing but if so, then maybe those people display a little hysterical paranoia, and one can't help but wonder if that comes from worrying about being caught. Hmm? I mean if you have nothing to hide, what's the problem?

Maybe they're worried about people finding things like this:

December 2001:

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.

November 2002:

National health insurance schemes turn a blind eye. Israel's participates in the costs of purchasing organs abroad, though only subject to rigorous vetting of the sources of the donation. Still, a May 2001 article in a the New York Times Magazine, quotes "the coordinator of kidney transplantation at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem (as saying that) 60 of the 244 patients currently receiving post-transplant care purchased their new kidney from a stranger - just short of 25 percent of the patients at one of Israel's largest medical centers participating in the organ business".

Many Israelis - attempting to avoid scrutiny - travel to east Europe, accompanied by Israeli doctors, to perform the transplantation surgery. These junkets are euphemistically known as "transplant tourism". Clinics have sprouted all over the benighted region. Israeli doctors have recently visited impoverished Macedonia, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Yugoslavia to discuss with local businessmen and doctors the setting up of kidney transplant clinics.

Such open involvement in what can be charitably described as a latter day slave trade gives rise to a new wave of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. The Ukrainian Echo, quoting the Ukrinform news agency, reported, on January 7, 2002, that, implausibly, a Ukrainian guest worker died in Tel-Aviv in mysterious circumstances and his heart was removed. The Interpol, according to the paper, is investigating this lurid affair.

According to scholars, reports of organ thefts and related abductions, mainly of children, have been rife in Poland and Russia at least since 1991. The buyers are supposed to be rich Arabs. [wink wink wink!- ed.]

May 2007:

Turkish police on Tuesday arrested an Israeli doctor suspected of being involved in an illegal ring of organ traders operating out of a private hospital in Istanbul. The man, Professor Zaki Shapira, was arrested in the midst of a gun battle which erupted in the hospital last weekend after four armed men stormed the facility and demanded their money back.

November 2007:

It was first written off as a sex ring, but that didn't make any sense. Who is going to pay $2,000 to have sex with a 12 yr old black boy, when you have hundreds of 10 yr old white Ukrainian girls all over Tel Aviv. But someone is paying $3,000 a kid wholesale, and the reason is black market organs.

It's just economics in organ trading. You bring in a 12 yr old into Tel Aviv, and you don't just grab one $5,000 kidney, and then spend $200,000 raising the kid through college. That kid hits the operating table and he has kidneys, liver, cornea, heart, lung, marrow, etc., and everything is removed. It happens in Israel because of the security needed.

The kidnappers get $3,000 a kid, and all the organs can bring $150,000.

The French “humanitarian” charity NGO Zoe’s Ark (L’Arche de Zoé) involved in Chad and Darfur is under investigation by the United Nations, France and Chad for trafficking in black children in the widely under-reported “L'Arche de Zoé affair.”

Oh dear. This doesn't look good, and we haven't even scratched the surface of what happens to the Palestinians.

Evidently some people believe in a pecking order, a food chain that applies to human beings, that can be exploited for gain.

Human strip mining of the dead for usable parts is not limited to former police states in South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina. Similar practices can be found in one of the wealthiest communities of the United States. In the fall of 1999, I sat in a diner in Hollywood with Jim C., notorious “organs broker” who solicited international buyers and sellers from his home. “There’s no reason for anyone to die in this country while waiting for a heart or a kidney to materialize. There are plenty of spare organs to be had in other parts of the world.” Though Jim is operating in a grey netherworld, he insists that what he does is not illegal. “Don’t think of me as an outlaw,” he said. “Think of me as a new version of the old-fashioned marriage broker. I locate and match up people in need.”

...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?”

...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.”

This attitude, so blithely expressed as the most reasonable, understandable expression of self-preservation in the world, strikes normal people as morally repugnant. Disgusting. Aberrant. Evil. The organ trafficking story represents the loose thread, the thread that needs to be pulled on relentlessly because it's going to unravel the lies covering up the culture of human sacrifice that governs our world. And in a way that people will readily understand.

Americans love to rally around anyone with cancer, any small-town story of somebody who needs a transplant, any kind of drama like that gets people thinking 'there but for the grace of God go I...' a saying I don't like one bit because it implies that God has withdrawn grace from people in distress, but not to quibble on that point... the idea being that Americans tend to appreciate the random nature of illness. They understand that illness can strike anyone at anytime. Nobody is safe. Illness somehow levels the playing field of life, and that encourages people to help each other, and hey the next thing you know you're on Extreme Home Makeover right? So to find out that the transplanted kidney you raised money for to help the sick kid in town might have a suspicious provenance, well that will give some people pause. It introduces an ethical dilemma into something that previously had been very clear.

Because if not every organ comes from a willing donor, then the value of human lives must go onto some mysterious scale. But who does the scale belong to?

The people who think they own the scale don't want you to ask that question because they know that normal people recoil from such judgments and from any people who make them so carelessly, so they're ramping up the hysteria and waving arms frantically to keep everyone away from this highly lucrative business of organ trafficking, which runs on their ability to make exactly such judgments without a drop of remorse. As if they own the scale that measures the value of human lives, which they most certainly do not.