MELANIE PHILLIPS: WHERE IS ALL THIS LEADING?
The tragic coma of English reason
WEDNESDAY, 23RD DECEMBER 2009
Melanie Phillips
In recent days, an open and unambiguous medieval-style blood libel has been regurgitated in the mainstream British media. This has been full of the sensational report that Israeli doctors had been ’harvesting’ the organs of Palestinians. The implication was that a) this was only being done to Palestinians and b) the Palestinians had been alive when it was done. Neither calumny was remotely true.
What had actually happened was that – as Tom Gross has noted — some 15 years ago one rogue Israeli doctor had been transplanting minor organs like cornea and skin from dead Israelis – mainly Jewish Israelis, but also a few Arab ones – without obtaining permission from the families. This is on a par with a similar scandal in Britain, where it was discovered that doctors had been removing organs from dead children as a matter of routine without informing their parents.
In the Israelis case, there was no use of organs from living patients. There was no singling out of Palestinians. Yet that was the impression created by one disgusting media report after another. As Gross observes, so far it is only the Guardian which has had the grace to acknowledge its error and put out a correction. No-one else seems to have bothered.
Such blood libels incites people to murderous hatred of Jews, for which purpose they have been used throughout history. Yet as Gross reports, as of yesterday evening for the second day running the BBC Persian service was continuing to transmit the appalling lie that Israel was ‘harvesting’ the organs of Palestinians — thus further inflaming a country whose leadership is already committed to the genocide of the Jews.
This ‘harvested organ’ blood libel surfaced in 2001 amongst the Palestinians; more recently and notoriously, it was given a new lease of life by the Swedish newspaper Aftenbladet; the editor of that paper subsequently admitted that his reporter had confessed that there was absolutely no evidence to support this accusation, which was based solely upon some statements made by several Palestinians in Gaza.
The Arab and Muslim world routinely circulates grotesque blood libels like this, often involving accusations that Jews are murdering and cannibalising Arab and Muslim children or else are poisoning the water supply or ( a recent variation) adulterating it with aphrodisiacs. These literally deranged and demented fantasies have until now been ignored by an indifferent west, for whom the reality of this Arab and Muslim derangement vis a vis the Jews was simply too inconvenient to their grand narrative of Israeli aggression to be reported. Now the western media has gone one step further. They are themselves reporting these sick and murderous fabrications as credible accusations.
The west has simply suspended reason for the duration.
I ask again: where is all this leading?
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
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