Officials
of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling Fatah party are falsely
claiming that Israel steals body parts from dead terrorists.
According
to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab
media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), Gaza and eastern Jerusalem, several
PA officials and Fatah movement members have recently put forward the
modern-day incarnation of an age-old libel. Fatah is the major component of the
authority.
The blood
libel was the medieval-era false accusation that Jews murdered Gentile children
to use their blood for religious purposes. This slander has taken many forms
and its dissemination has historically been followed by murders of Jews,
sometimes in large numbers.
CAMERA
has noted (“Palestinian T.V. Favorite Accuses
Israel of ‘Harvesting’ Terrorists’ Organs,” Nov. 11, 2015) that PA officials
have been promoting the libel. These have included Riyad Mansour, the PA’s
Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations. Mansour is frequently
treated by news media as a reliable source. He sent a letter to the president
of the U.N. Security Council, claiming that bodies of Palestinian terrorists
killed “were returned without corneas and other organs.”
More
recently, other Palestinian Arab officials have joined Mansour to claim that
Israel harvests organs.
On Nov.
17, 2015, the PA ambassador to Bahrain, Khaled Aref, claimed in Al-Hayat Al-Hadid (the PA’s official daily newspaper)
that Israel “steals the Marytrs’ organs, and sells them.”
According
to PMW, on December 24, members of the dormant Palestinian Legislative Council
further disseminated the blood libel by calling for autopsies on terrorists
killed “in order to know if the Martyrs’ organs have been stolen [by Israel]
and to legally prosecute the occupation.”
The last
elections for the PLC took place on Jan. 25, 2006. Subsequent elections have
been indefinitely postponed by PA leadership.
PMW
reports that Fatah Central Committee member Jamal Muhaisen claimed on official
PA T.V. on December 27:
“There
are Israeli testimonies acknowledging that organs are being taken from the
bodies of young Martyrs. While the body is with the Israelis, organs are taken
according to Israel’s needs, and afterwards they hand over the body [to the
PA].”
Muhaisen
appeared along with Mukeimar Abu Sa’ada, a “political science lecturer”, on a
T.V. program called “Topic of the Day.” Like Mansour, he also has been a media
source.
Sa’ada
previously has been a guest on KCRW, a National Public Radio member station
that broadcasts in the greater Los Angeles Area. According to KCRW’s Web site, Sa’ada appeared as a guest for two
episodes (“The High Price of Saving a Single Soldier,” Dec. 23, 2009 and
“Israel, Gaza and the Prospects for Peace,” Jan. 7, 2009). On KCRW’s tax-payer
subsidized program, Sa’ada implied that Israeli soldiers intentionally targeted
children during Israel’s 2008-09 war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Seeking
to imply undue legitimacy, he also referred to members of Hamas, a U.S.-listed
terrorist group, as “resistance fighters.”
Adding to
its recent promotion of antisemitic canards like those that have encouraged
violence against Jews, PMW notes that Fatah celebrated its
51st anniversary by broadcasting a “documentary” on official PA TV that
connects official PA propaganda with that of Nazi Germany. The program opens
with:
“[Europe]
suffered a tragedy by providing refuge for the Jews…Faced with the Jews’
schemes, Europe could not bear their character traits, monopolies, corruption,
and their control and climbing up positions in government.”
In his
Jan. 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler flogged similar claims of secret Jewish
conspiracies and influence, declaring:
“During
the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish
race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day
take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation,
and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their
laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been
laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet:
if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not
be…the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
When it
comes to antisemitism, what’s old is new or newly used again—from leaders of
the Third Reich to leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
