10 Truly Shocking Facts About Organ Trafficking

This was sent to me. 10 truly shocking fact about Organ Trafficking.

Its rare to find a person who hasn’t heard of the urban legend recounting some poor guy duped into a situation that leaves him awakening in a tub of ice with a message indicating he must call 911 as one of his kidneys has been taken. While that particular story is not true, sadly it is based on some very real and shocking truths about organ trafficking. The unbalanced system of too many people in need of organ transplants and high levels of poverty worldwide have contributed to create a situation that leaves many desperate people willing to do anything to sell or receive illegal organs.

Read below to learn ten shocking facts about organ trafficking.

1. People seized against their will. According to a book by UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte, members of the Kosovo Liberation Army seized hundreds of people for involuntary organ harvesting. The organs were then flown to foreign clinics for transplantation. Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders have denied these allegations.
2. Organs harvested from children. An investigation was started in Mosambique after several local human rights groups and the Brazilian Mission in Nampula notified authorities that many children were missing vital organs, with several of the children believed to have died as a result of the harvesting. Most of the harvested organs are believed to be sent to nearby South Africa for both transplant and religious rites. There have also been reports of children being kidnapped and killed for their organs in South America.
3. Outrageous price of kidneys. 2003 estimates from the World Health Organization believe that the price of a trafficked kidney ranges from $700 in South Africa to over $30,000 in the US, with many other countries paying between $1,000 and $10,000 for a kidney. Recent news reports surrounding the corruption scandal in New Jersey indicate that a broker was asking $160,000 for a kidney, unknowingly to an undercover FBI agent.
4. Sellers denied money and care. Many of the black market kidneys sold worldwide are done so by poor and vulnerable people in desperate need of money. They are typically paid only a fraction of the amount for which they are sold, and sometimes are denied payment by unscrupulous brokers and receive poor or no medical care for their recovery. These donors are often left debilitated by the lack of care, often not fully recovering from the donation. Sometimes entire villages have given their kidneys, like Villivakkum in India that is sometimes referred to as "Kidneyvakkum."
5. Go in for an exam, leave without a kidney. In Egypt, one method of organ trafficking revolved around a hiring scheme. Young men were hired for a job and sent to a physician for an exam to ensure their good health. The young men would awaken in a hospital in pain and missing a kidney. Victims of this scheme have faced threats of violence when they have filed charges against those who perpetrated the crime.

Read the rest here.

I had heard about India and the practice there of the poor selling their kidneys since the early 1990's, but did not know about some of these others. The Rabbis who were arrested charged for matching donors with recipients, a practice illegal in the US and Canada, not for stealing someone's kidney. A minor difference. It is still despicable. And killing children for their organs is something too gruesome to contemplate.

While there is no truth to the rumor that Israel was kidnapping Palestinians for their organs, there is the story of Yoni Jesner.

Yoni Jesner, a 19-year-old student youth leader from Glasgow, Scotland, was killed in a suicide bomb attack on a No. 4 bus in Tel Aviv in September 2002. He was studying at a yeshiva at the time and planned to return to the UK to study medicine.

Yoni died in Ichilov Hospital the day after the bombing from shrapnel wounds to the head. His family agreed to donate one of Yoni's kidneys, which went to seven-year old Palestinian Yasmin Abu Ramila from east Jerusalem, who had waited two years for a suitable organ.

Speaking at the time, Yoni's brother Ari said: "The family is very proud that out of this tragic situation and Yoni's death that we were able and Yoni was able to give life to others. I think the most important principle here is that life was given to another human being."

"What religion, nationality, race, culture or creed is not what is important here," he added.

At the time, the girl's mother, Dina Abu Ramila, said: "I don't know how to thank the family of the victim of the attack. I feel for their pain and thank them for the organ donation that saved my daughter's life."

For religious Jews and some Christians, donating an organ is against the tenets of their faith. But I personally cannot see how this can be. For by being an Organ and Tissue donor you save lives. And isn't life the great gift that G-d has given us?

If you aren't a donor, look deep within you, and ask yourself':
"What if I needed an Organ? Who would be my donor?"

Then sign up for the registry. Give the gift of life. A gift that G-d has given us all.

BLOOD LIBEL!!!

In the Middle Ages illiterate and ignorant people would believe any lie told to them by the Church, the Nobility or even their neighbor if it was said often enough. So it is true today.

In the Middle Ages Jews were accuse of poisoning wells, causing the Black Death, ritual murder and killing Christian children so their blood (especially virgin blood) could be used in the making of matzoh for Passover.

Today the blood libel has new twists to it. Matzoh is still being made with the blood of children (only now they are Muslim children), body parts of Muslim children are used in the making of food for Purim (the Saudis are very fond of this one), and now there is this bit of anti-Semitism from Sweden:

The tabloid Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s most popular newspapers, published a report Tuesday that claimed IDF soldiers execute Arabs in Judea and Samaria, harvest their organs and sell them. The report carried a photograph that purportedly shows the body of a victim of such an execution, with a large scar running from his chin to his abdomen. It notes the IDF’s explanation that the scar is from an autopsy which is routinely performed on people who are killed in fighting – but seems not to give it much credit and prefers a completely unsubstantiated claim by Arabs regarding forced organ harvesting.

The report, which appears under the heading, in quotes, "Our sons plundered for their organs,” begins with snippets from a transcript of an FBI recording of a Jewish man who was arrested in July, in connection with a corruption scandal in New Jersey involving elected officials, rabbis, money laundering and illegal organ trading.

Screenshot from Aftonbladet website: article shows scarred body, Jewish man, leaves readers to make connection.

Immediately after providing a short description of the FBI’s suspicions against that group, reporter Donald Boström takes his readers across the ocean to discuss the organ trade in Israel, without explaining what connection there may be between the two matters. He describes “a strong suspicion” among Palestinians that young men’s organs were harvested by the IDF “as in China and Pakistan.” Boström repeats that this is “a very serious suspicion” and suggests that the International Court of Justice should open an investigation into it.

The paper says that half of the kidneys that are used in transplants in Israel are purchased illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America and that Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of the matter, but do nothing to stop it. It then connects the shortage of body parts in Israel to stories of Palestinian men who, it says, are killed and returned to their villages five days later by the IDF.

17 year old eyewitness account
The reporter then gives what he says is his own eyewitness account from 1992 -- 17 years ago -- of an IDF raid on a village in which a rioter named Bilal Achmed Ghanaian was shot and severely injured. He was taken away by a military helicopter and brought back by the army five days later, dead. As his family members buried him, they saw a large scar running from his stomach to his chin.

The report then quotes Arabs who claim that their sons were used as forced organ donors but provides no support for this claim.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said that the newspaper had “turned the demonization of Israel into a sacred cause.” He called upon Swedish citizens to express their disgust with “the incitement to hate crimes that the report includes.”

Aftonbladet claims to be the leading daily newspaper in Sweden and in Scandinavia, with a readership of more than 1.5 million.

I think I am finally at a loss of words or an action to take over this. Not only is is libelous, but it shows the ignorant mentality of the nation of Sweden.

At first I was going to cancel my organ and bone marrow donation cards, but that wouldn't really solve this problem, only hurt many others in the long run.

I would boycott all Swedish products, but there aren't many of them sold here in the US. So I just blog about this, feeling powerless to do anything, yet knowing the people of Sweden actually believe this, knowing the government of Sweden condones these stories, knowing the idiot Moonbats here in the US will use this to defame Jews world-wide.

There are just times when a person must choose to do nothing, and pray that somehow someway sanity will return to Sweden and just one person in the country will cry out:

THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE HERE!