Miftah, a radical Palestinian organization that co-sponsored and organized the rejected trip to Israel by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, published an antisemitic screed on its website outlandishly accusing Israel of stealing organs from Ukrainian children and earthquake victims in Haiti.
The conspiracy missive was authored by Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and is still present on Miftah’s website as of this writing.
It was published just after the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and accuses the U.S. and Israel of offering assistance to victims for “hidden political and military objectives.” In the case of Israel, Shaaban claimed that the Jewish state was harvesting organs.
The February 2010 piece on Miftah’s website reads:
Helping the victims of disasters has become now an occasion for launching public relations campaigns or achieving hidden political and military objectives. People still fall victim to earthquakes, disasters, occupation, oppression and terrorism. They also fall victim to campaigns which use their tragedy to achieve other purposes which have nothing to do with the value, importance, sanctity and dignity of human life.
After the Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom wrote about the Israeli army killing Palestinian youth in order to harvest their organs, there were other media reports about Israelis stealing Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs. Once again there are documented reports from Haiti that organs are being stolen by Israelis without international justice intervening to put an end to such criminal practices against innocent vulnerable people.
The United States took advantage of the chaos in Haiti to tighten its control over the island. Thus, we can see that the disaster in Haiti provided an opportunity to other parties to make a move on public relations level or on the political and military level in order to turn facts on their head and project a glossy image of the causes of human suffering in different parts of the world.
Below is a screengrab of the text from Miftah’s website (highlighter added):
Shaaban did not say which “documented reports” she was referring to that purportedly show that “organs are being stolen by Israelis in Haiti.” Nor did she specify which “media reports” were about “Israelis stealing Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs.” The piece was also published in Lebanon’s Daily Star.
The Jerusalem Post previously traced a debunked claim about Israeli organ harvesting in Haiti to a Gaza-based website and a propaganda claim on Hezbollah television:
The allegation that IDF medics harvested organs from Haitians to use in transplants was published in the Gaza-based Web site The Palestine Telegraph. … The article, titled, “Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs,” was written by a Boston blogger Stephen Lendman.
Lendman — who in his biog says his main area of interest is for “justice for all the oppressed peoples of the world like the long-suffering people of Haiti and the Palestinians,” accused Israel of a “crime against humanity.”
The article makes reference to a report by Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV that cites “a damning YouTube video” posted by an American named “T. West” from a group called AfriSynergy Productions who said: “The video presents something to think about while exploiting the horrible tragedy that has befallen Haiti where Israeli occupation soldiers are engaged in organ trafficking.”
The reference to Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom refers to a wild claim printed in 2009 by the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet that the IDF was harvesting Palestinian organs. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called it “a mark of disgrace” for the Swedish media, while Prime Minister Bejamamin Netanyahu demanded that Sweden condemn the outlet. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the piece a “blood libel.”
The “media reports” about “Israelis stealing Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs” seem to be about a Ukrainian professor who baselessly claimed at a November 2009 conference in Kiev that Israel brought in thousands of Ukrainian children to use their bodies as “spare parts.”
Breitbart previously reported that Miftah, led by notorious Palestinian extremist and Israel boycott defender Hanan Ashrawi, co-sponsored and organized Tlaib and Omar’s trip.
The two congresswomen were barred from entering Israel in keeping with a law that allows Israel to deny entry to supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Omar and Tlaib are both prominent BDS supporters who last month introduced a resolution in Congress aimed at supporting the antisemitic movement, which targets the Middle East’s only democracy and is engaged in economic warfare against Israel. BDS openly seeks the dismantling of Israel.
Besides her role as head of Miftah, Ashrawi also doubles as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee. She is a supporter of BDS.
Ashrawi claimed the trip was supposed to be a way for Omar and Tlaib “to engage with the Palestinian people directly and to see things on the ground.”
NGO Monitor, a watchdog on extremist nonprofits, notes that Miftah has accused Israel of committing “massacres,” “apartheid,” “summary executions” of Palestinian youth and “Judaizing” Jerusalem. It has also accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing of Palestinian-Israeli Arabs.”
Ashrawi was a political leader of the violent first Palestinian Intifada and served as deputy to late PLO leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. She is known for espousing anti-Israel conspiracy theories and attempting to justify Palestinian “resistance” against the Jewish state.
In a 2001 speech to the World Conference Against Racism, Ashrawi referred to the creation of Israel as a “Nakba” or “catastrophe.”
At the height of the deadly second Palestinian intifada campaign of suicide bombings and shootings, Ashrawi wrote the following in October 2001 of the carnage: “I see it as an expression of the will to resist, of the spirit of a people that will not succumb to coercion and subjugation. … Popular protests and acts of resistance — political, human resistance — are necessary to demonstrate the people’s will.”
The term “resistance” is usually used by the Palestinians as a euphemism for deadly terrorist attacks targeting Israelis.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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