bituaries

A Modern-Day Blood Libel

Abraham Cooper
and Harold Brackman

Special Commentary

Los Angeles/JTA

W

ith the Palestinian family
cited in the Swedish daily
Aftonbladet now denying ever
claiming that their son's organs were "sto-
len" by the Israeli military, maybe the lurid
and grotesque accusation published by the
newspaper in mid-August will disappear.
Maybe the idea of an international
Jewish conspiracy stretching from Israel
to New Jersey harvesting the flesh of
Palestinian innocents will be forgotten
except as a 21st-century footnote to the
odious blood libel tradition. It's a tradition
that dates back to Apion of Alexandria,
who 2,000 years ago accused Jews of
kidnapping non-Jewish captives to be fat-
tened and eaten at the Sabbath feast.

But perhaps this screed is only a harbin-
ger of a new epidemic of lies against Jews
the likes of which we haven't seen since
the days of Hitler and Stalin.
Sweden's ambassador to Israel imme-
diately denounced the obviously phony
blood libel, but then had the ground
cut out from under her by her own gov-
ernment's assertion that it had to stand
behind "constitutionally protected free
speech:'
Are the baseless charges splashed across
a double spread in the style section of
Aftonbladet anti-Semitic? Of course, but
that's not the worst of it.
Sweden's government, through its
defense of the indefensible, has sanctioned
Aftonbladet's trafficking in political anti-
Semitism — a very different beast than
the everyday kind of prejudice still experi-
enced by Jews and other minorities.
Historically, this virulent ideology not
only has justified social and economic

In th4

discrimination against Jews. In Europe,
it also opened the door to ghettoization,
pogroms, deportations, yellow stars and,
ultimately, mass murder.
Make no mistake about it, there is an
international conspiracy afoot in the 2 1 s t
century, but it's a not a secret Jewish plot
out of the pages of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. It's an open coalition of
Palestinian extremists and their collabora-
tors in Europe and North America who
don't even try to hide their coordinated
efforts to make Israel into a pariah state as
a prelude to elimination.
For 20 years, Palestinian extremists and
their Mideast allies have been accusing
Israelis and Jews of murdering non-Jewish
innocents to profit from their blood. A few
years ago, the Iran government's TV chan-
nel aired a weekly drama titled Zahra's
Blue Eyes that portrayed "Zionist" doctors
kidnapping little Palestinian children to
harvest their organs.

unprecedented, chatiolging economic tulles,
con ti,m,„
fantii viv ith

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IRA KAUFMAN CHAPEL

THFFELD

138

September 17 • 2009

Obituaries

These fantasies, increasingly marketed
as fact, are part of a broader Palestinian
hate literature claiming that the AIDS
virus is an Israeli ethnic bomb designed
to selectively murder Africans and
Arabs. There is even the new charge in
Palestinian media outlets funded by
the governments of Denmark and the
Netherlands that the swine flu is an
Israeli-Jewish conspiracy.
Aftonbladet has managed to main-
stream a favorite Palestine libel, as well as
update it, by accusing New Jersey rabbis
arrested for money laundering of involve-
ment with Israeli soldiers in an interna-
tional Jewish organ harvesting ring.
The revived libel has now made the leap
from medieval times, resurfacing in post-
modern Europe.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of

the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Historian Harold
Brackman is a consultant to the center.