Posted on 01/03/2010 9:29:06 AM PST by JoeProBono
Earlier this year a Swedish journalist claimed that soldiers and doctors at the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, Israel, killed Palestinians for their organs.
The Israeli government originally dismissed the accusations as vicious anti-Semitic rumors, but was forced to acknowledge that there was some truth to the claims when an American anthropologist released an interview she had conducted in 2000 with the former head of Israel's main forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss.
In that interview, Hiss stated that body parts including corneas, arteries, and bones were taken from dead bodies — Israeli, Palestinian, and others — without consent during the 1990s and transplanted into wounded soldiers. The Israeli military then admitted the procedures had been done but stated that the practice had ended 10 years ago.
International organ theft has made news before. Last year an Indian doctor, Amit Kumar, was arrested in Nepal, accused of being the leader of a "kidney theft ring" that supposedly took up to 500 kidneys from unwilling donors over the past nine years. Rumors circulated that Indian peasants were forced to give up their organs at gunpoint, though the accusations remain unproven and Kumar has not been tried nor convicted.
Organs have also been taken from executed Chinese prisoners. Although the Chinese government claims that such organ harvesting is rarely done and then only with the consent of the prisoners, several respected human rights organizations claim otherwise.....
... There is no evidence that the premise of the original newspaper story — that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for the purpose of harvesting their organs — is true. (Often the very act of killing the victims would render many of their organs unusable; if you want to use a man's vital organs, for example, you don't shoot him in the chest.)
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
The mythology of the murder of people for body parts is just part of the continuing mythology of those whose false premises have failed them. If your acceptance of unreality results in your military and economic failure, you have to come up with scapegoats to explain the failures.
Say what?
It is like someone telling a resident of an African slum that they are poor because Americans stole their money. Or the Islamic Clerics who tell their flock that vaccinations against disease is a plot to make them infertile.
It is a pretty successful tactic to tell people that their problems have always been created by someone else, and those people are really, really evil.
One of the hardest things for any adult to do is to accept that the foundational assumptions of his world view are wrong. Many people would rather die than change their world view. Myths that demonize others give them a fig leaf to believe in, instead of requiring them to question their assumptions.
The tendency to scapegoat is a constant of the human condition to be factored in like any other tendency.
Years ago I read a science fiction story that predicted organ theft would become common once it became more technologically feasible. I hope we are not approaching such a condition.
The tendency to scapegoat is hardly constant. Some cultures are far more prone to it than others. It needs to constantly be fought in order to minimize it. The best way to fight it is to emphasize personal responsibility, rationality, and fact.
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