Thursday, March 25, 2010

UN disgraces itself (again) by posting organ harvesting claim

From JPost, 25/03/2010, by TOVAH LAZAROFF:

...Allegations that Israel harvests Palestinian organs have re-surfaced and are posted on the UN Human Rights Council Web site in the form of a statement written by an NGO.

The International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination [EAFORD] accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing and massacres” before it moved on to the issue of what it called “dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians.”

“Their [Palestinian] human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market,” wrote EAFORD. “Israeli physicians, Medical Centres, rabbis and the Israeli army may be involved,” it stated.

...EAFORD called for a boycott of Israel physicians and medical centers. It also asked the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report on the matter to the Security Council and to demand that it be sent to the International Criminal Court for action.

EAFORD’s statement along with that of other NGOs can be found on the UNHRC Web site in a section for documents, which were submitted for the council’s 13th session, which is taking place this March in Geneva.

...The council and the commissioner’s office, “however unwittingly, helped to propagate an anti-Semitic libel by publishing [the EAFORD’s charges] as an unofficial UN document,” wrote UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.

...Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said it was “outrageous” that the allegations were published on a UN Web site. “The only organ that was stolen is in people’s brains ...I am deeply revolted by the fact that anyone in their right mind can actually advance such horribly surrealistic accusations,” said Palmor.

According to the NGO Eye on the UN, EAFORD was founded in Libya and accredited at the UN in 1981. Its Web site states that it has focused on the ideological systems of Apartheid and Zionism.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had no response to the matter...

...US Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe told the council “it is too often exploited as a platform to single out Israel, which undermines its credibility.”...

Out of the four resolutions which passed Wednesday, one focused on the “occupation of the Golan [Heights],” two focused on alleged human rights violations in the West Bank including settlement construction and Israeli actions against Palestinians in east Jerusalem, and the fourth called for the Palestinian right to self-determination.

Israel's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Aharon Leshno Yaar, said, “we have witnessed today another anti-Israel show of the human rights council.”

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