UN Condemned For Making Israeli Organ Harvesting Claim
By Steven Edwards
03/24/2010
National Post
Original Source: – HYPERLINK http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0302/Bluster-at-UN-Human-Rights-Council-as-US-and-Iran-trade-barbs http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2721399

Extreme claims that Israel is trafficking the organs of dead Palestinians are printed in an official United Nations document, exposing the world body to charges it is doing the bidding of anti-Israel countries such as Iran and Libya.
The revelation comes as Iran and Libya are leading candidates for election this year to the UN Human Rights Council, which the world body bills as the planet's foremost human rights monitoring group.
The election of Iran would be an affront to Canada, which each year leads a campaign in the UN General Assembly to have Iran's human rights record condemned -- invariably in the face of substantial opposition from Iranian sympathizer states such as Cuba, Venezuela and even Afghanistan.
Israel's organ trafficking is alleged by the Libya-founded International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD). Its website says it is focused on the ideological systems of apartheid and Zionism.
But because the UN General Assembly has printed the charges in an official document, they are now part of the international record emerging from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council.
Adding credence to the claims, the document also highlights the fact that EAFORD enjoys special consultative status under UN rules, and that the statement is in the hands of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
We call upon you to immediately cease circulating this racist, hateful and inflammatory text to the ambassadors and other delegates of the Human Rights Council; to gather up and destroy all existing copies; and to remove it from the Human Rights Council website, says the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch in a letter Wednesday to Navanethem Pillay, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Ambassador Alex Van Meeuwen of Belgium, president of the Human Rights Council.
No spokespeople for those two UN officers returned calls seeking comment Wednesday.
The UN paper containing the EAFORD statement says that Israel has conducted ethnic cleansing and massacres of Palestinians, and created the largest open-air prison in the world with its West Bank wall.
The statement also claims the wall, which Israel says it built to prevent suicide-bomber infiltration of Israel, amounts to an act of siege and economic genocide.
The content further says Israel has let loose hordes of marauding gangs of Israeli illegal settlers in order to launch pogroms against Palestinians.
But EAFORD seeks to make a new case for international action against Israel by presenting organ-trafficking allegations as a new dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now it is the turn of the dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians, says the paper. Their human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market. Israeli physicians, medical centres, rabbis and the Israeli army may be involved, according to reports published in the Swedish press and criminal investigations in the United States.
The Human Rights Council routinely presents statements submitted by accredited non-governmental organizations as official documents - but only after the language has been screened. In contrast to what the UN reviewers approved for the EAFORD statement, they told UN Watch recently not to use the word regime when referring to the governments of Sudan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Zimbabwe because it would offend those countries, said Hillel Neuer, the group's executive director.
The Canadian Jewish Congress is among Jewish community organizations that began Wednesday to express outrage that the UN is involved in distributing the allegations, which reflect age-old blood libels accusing Jews of using human blood in certain of their rituals.
Not only is there no proof, it is a takeoff of the historical calumny of the Jewish blood libel, and that this is coming out under the auspices of the United Nations, and from an accredited UN organization, is breathtaking in its shame, said Bernie Farber, CLC chief executive officer.
EAFORD's Swedish press reference appears linked to an op-ed piece the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet ran last year. In it, freelance journalist Donald Bostrom called for an investigation into claims that Israeli soldiers may have harvested organs from dead Palestinians.
But the author later told CNN he had no proof any such thing had gone on, and said he sought an investigation solely to clear up numerous claims of organ theft in the 1990s.
Other references may be linked to accusations of organ stealing that resurfaced this year after Israel dispatched Israel Defense Forces medics to Haiti to help treat the injured following that country's Jan. 12 earthquake.
In a swirl of unsubstantiated reporting, a Gaza-based website called The Palestine Telegraph ran an accusatory article by Boston blogger Stephen Lendman, who cited a report by a TV network run by the Lebanese-based anti-Israel group Hezbollah, which in turn had referred to what it called a damning YouTube video posted by an American named T. West of a group called AfriSynergy Productions.
Iranian-run Press TV picked up on the accusations, producing a report that was in turn distributed by the online magazine of the pan-Arab al Jazeera network.
The document emerges as Ban leaves for Libya, where the UN chief will participate in the League of Arab States summit meeting.
Geneva-based diplomats say Libya, which the monitoring group Human Rights Watch says in a recent report continues to unjustly detain prisoners, is quietly seeking a place among the Human Rights Council's 47 voting members.
Since there is no competition for the spots reserved in the May General Assembly election for the African group, Libya's ascension is currently assured.
Iran is one of five countries competing for four Asian group spots. Despite having a human rights record that Canada and other Western countries routinely condemn, diplomats say the Islamic republic may be able to use its oil wealth and other tactics to attract enough votes to displace one of the other countries, which are Thailand, Malaysia, Maldives and Qatar.