BBC Blood Libels

[this item has nothing to do w/ Obama]


BBC Feeding Anti-Semitic Lies to Iranians [Tom Gross]

On Sunday, I noted that the British media’s slandering of Israel has gone further than ever and is no longer limited to leftist papers, like the Independent and the Guardian, but is now common in more conservative ones, such as the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Financial Times.

(This sensationalistic photo, of unknown origin, is highlighted on the BBC Persian website.)
In the last two days, the British print media have gone further, digging up a story from 15 years ago about an Israeli doctor who transplanted minor organs, like corneas and skin tissue, from dead Israelis — mainly Jewish Israelis, but also a few Arab ones — to suggest to readers that Israel is now, as a matter of policy, harvesting the organs of live Palestinians.

Some countries — notably China, but not Israel — do remove live organs for transplant. There is scarcely a word about this in the British media. The Iran-backed Lebanese terror militia Hizbullah has been accused of harvesting the organs of Lebanese Christians, with hardly any investigation of this charge by the so-called human-rights groups of America and Europe.

This morning, the Guardian, unlike other British newspapers, apologized, writing:

We should not have put the headline “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs” on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers without getting permission from the families of the deceased (21 December, page 15). That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter.

Yet as of Tuesday evening (Iran time), for a second day, the taxpayer-funded BBC Persian language service is continuing to highlight the outrageous anti-Semitic lie that Israel is harvesting the organs of Palestinians — on its home page here and in a story here.You do not see such garbage on Radio Farda, which is the U.S. government’s equivalent of BBC Persian.

BBC Persian is under the direct supervision of the British foreign office. Why British politicians and commentators (including those from the Conservative party) put up with it, is beyond me.Isn’t the Iranian regime serving up enough anti-Semitic hate on its own without the BBC joining in?

(Incidentally, many governments have considered using organs more than Israel does. For example, Britain, but the BBC hasn’t made a conspiracy theory out of that.)