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Israeli Organ-Harvesting Stories Spread

Through Arab media, blogosphere

by
Ari M. Brostoff
September 21, 2009

As Israel and Sweden continue to duke it out over the Swedish newspaper story that accused the IDF of harvesting organs from slain Palestinians, the original allegations are spreading. According to the Jerusalem Post, the Algerian daily Al-Khabar started the globalization in an article claiming that Moroccan and Algerian gangsters have been kidnapping children on the streets of Algeria, transporting them to Morocco, then selling them to Israelis and American Jews, who kill them and sell their organs. That story has been picked up by Arab and Muslim media outlets, including not only Iran’s official media outlet PressTV, but also mainstream sources like Al-Jazeera, which linked this claim to the scandals involving Yehuda Hiss, Israel’s former chief pathologist, who resigned from his post after being investigated on charges of organ harvesting, and (like the Swedish paper’s story) to Levy Rosenbaum, the New Jersey rabbi arrested in July for his alleged involvement in the black-market kidney trade. According to Al-Jazeera’s magazine supplement, “The organ theft scandal in Israel is likely to have a domino effect as similar crimes by Israeli organizations in the Arab world have been unearthed; an international Zionist conspiracy to kidnap Algerian children and harvest their organs.”

Ari M. Brostoff is Culture Editor at Jewish Currents.