UN continues to spread Aftonbladet’s Jewish Blood Libels.

Recently the Jerusalem Post  published an article which linked the story published last summer by Sweden’s largest news tabloid Aftonbladet, “Israeli thefts of Palestinian organs”, as the basis for an NGO posting a similar written claim on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Website.

The allegations that Israeli soldiers purposely killed Palestinians and then harvested their organs were first published in an article written by Swedish journalist Donald Boström in Sweden’s largest news tabloid Aftonbladet.

The full original article (in Swedish) can be found here

In the article, Boström not only claimed that Israel went on killing sprees to harvest Palestinian organs but also claimed that the organ thefts were a part of a larger network of Jewish individuals that financially benefitted from the thefts. These other Jewish individuals included both rabbis and Jewish doctors in the US.

 Picture published in Aftonbladet






Bostöm’s horrid conspiracy story, which is frighteningly similar to hundred-year-old blood libels against Jews, was criticized by many and further denied by Israel. Boström “later admitted that his article relied solely on the testimony of Palestinian families for his story. This, of course, further reduces the credibility of an already biased and unsubstantiated story.

Now, as noted in the Jerusalem Post, “The International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination” [EAFORD]  has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing and massacres” as well as an issue they call “dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians.”

In a section for “documents” on UN’s Human Rights Council’s Web site, EAFORD writes (the 6th document from the top); “Their [Palestinian] human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market,”
The written statement further reads: “Israeli physicians, medical centers, rabbis and the Israeli army may be involved,” and
“After Israeli physicians remove organs they think marketable, the soldiers bury the bodies in graves that carry only numbers and no names, or place them in sealed caskets and deliver them under curfew conditions to the families and supervise the digging of the graves and burial”.

EAFORD’s allegations of Israeli organ trade are very, if not identical, to the Jewish blood libels published by Aftonbladet.

The NGO which drafted the document, also "called for a boycott of Israel physicians and medical centers, as well as asked the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report the matter to the Security Council and demand that it be sent to the International Criminal Court for action".

According to the NGO “Eye on the UN”, EAFORD was founded in Libya and accredited at the UN in 1981. EAFORD’s Website states that it has focused on the ideological systems of Apartheid and Zionism.

As a response to the continuation of Swedish Aftonbladet’s Jewish blood libels, UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer,  “called on the UN council and high commissioner to immediately cease circulating this racist, hateful and inflammatory text to the ambassadors and other delegates of the UNHRC.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, rightly, that it was “outrageous” that the allegations were published on a UN Web site.

While it is shocking that both open hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism flourish in the Swedish media, it is beyond and below all expectations to find that an organ which is part of the UN also spreads libels and untruths about Israel. These kinds of libels promote world-wide anti-Semitism and baseless hatred of Israel, yet the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has yet to respond to this shameful issue…