PETITION FOR FREE SPEECH AND THE INVESTIGATION OF ORGAN THEFT FROM PALESTINIANS

Please Sign Petition to Support Free Speech

and an Investigation of Alleged

Israeli Organ Theft From Palestinians

Five organizations have joined together to sponsor the following petition:

"As people deeply concerned with human rights, we believe it is essential to listen respectfully when occupied people speak about war crimes committed against them. Therefore, we support Donald Boström and Aftonbladet in their decision to publish 'Our sons plundered for their organs.'

We salute the Swedish government's refusal to submit to Israeli pressure and undermine the freedom of the press. We support calls for an investigation and urge the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other competent tribunals to undertake a thorough, impartial investigation of allegations that Israelis have unlawfully removed organs from Palestinians."

There is a full background statement at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/ .

The petition sponsored by:

Deir Yassin Remembered
www.deiryassin.org/

Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends
www.a2vigil.org/

If Americans Knew
ifamericansknew.com/

Voices of Palestine
http://www.voicesofpalestine/

We Hold These Truths
whtt.org/

The petition

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/

BACKGROUND: In late July 2009, FBI Agent Robert J. Cooke filed a criminal complaint in US District Court against Levy Rosenbaum alleging that he unlawfully conspired "to acquire, receive, and otherwise transfer human organs."

Rosenbaum is quoted as indicating he had been procuring human organs for "[t]en years" and there are "people over there [in Israel] hunting" for organs.

On August 17, 2009, a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, published "Our sons plundered for their organs," by veteran Middle East photojournalist Donald Boström.

Boström indicates the Rosenbaum story, which garnered international attention, inspired him to revisit his experiences in Palestine in the 1990s. He writes: "I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza ~ meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. … '

Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied." Boström opines that these charges raise "enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation …"

Boström's article echoes a report by Mary Barrett; "Autopsies and Executions," which was published in April 1990 in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. In it, Barrett concludes, "The question of organ theft is of compelling concern to Palestinians."

In June 2001, Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley and Organs Watch testified to the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. She described a "multi-million dollar business" that the Israeli Ministry of Health refused "to intervene and crack down on." She stated:

"… hundreds of kidney patients from Israel … travel in privately brokered 'transplant tourist' junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania …. to Russia … and to South Africa …

"While in Israel for Organs Watch in the summer of [2000] and, again in March 2001, … I interviewed more than 50 transplants professionals, transplant patients, and organs buyers and sellers involved in commercialized transplants … none were willing to condemn a practice which they saw as 'saving lives'. …

"Meanwhile, human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinians [sic] by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv. …

"A more troubling phenomenon is the support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the illicit national 'program' of transplant tourism. Some patients who traveled with the outlaw Israeli transplant surgeon to other countries noted that in each of the organized transplant groups were members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them."

It's worth recalling that millions of Palestinians live under brutal military occupation by troops of the very same Israeli Ministry of Defense. Just a little more than a year after Scheper-Hughes' testimony, Israel's Chief Pathologist and Director of the national Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv was investigated.

Arutz Sheva, reports in 2005, that Dr. Yehuda Hiss agreed to a plea bargain with Israeli prosecutors. It says: "In all of the 125 cases, Dr. Hiss and his subordinates removed organs, bones and tissue without the permission of, and in many cases, against the expressed wishes of the families of the deceased."

Veteran, award-winning Palestinian journalist Kawther Salam wrote recently: "The issue of stealing the Palestinian organs is known to everybody in Palestine. I reported several times about this crime."

She concluded: "If the Israelis go forward and cause troubles for Donald Boström in court, I will volunteer to testify in his favor …"

Israelis have gone forward to cause trouble. The Yedioth Ahronoth reports, "Thousands of Israelis on Sunday signed an internet petition calling for a consumers' boycott on Swedish home products retailer IKEA, as well as other companies from the Scandinavian country …"

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pressuring Sweden's government to "condemn the 'anti-Semitic' article" and "Swedish Chancellor of Justice Goeran Lambertz received two written requests on Tuesday asking to investigate whether the report amounted to racial agitation …"

Ha'aretz reports the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) is delaying the issuance of press credentials to Swedish journalists trying to get into Gaza. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports Israeli lawyer Guy Ophir filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against the Aftonbladet and Boström in a New York court.

Despite the vociferous Israeli response, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has called for "an immediate, serious investigation into reports alleging that Zionist occupation forces stole organs from young Palestinians they killed in the West Bank and Gaza."

The younger brother of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, whose mutilated body was pictured in Boström's article, is quoted in the Jerusalem Post as follows: "But in light of the investigative report in the Swedish newspaper, we are demanding an international commission of inquiry into the case."

American Muslims for Palestine has also stated it "believes the questions the article raises must be investigated."

PETITION TEXT: As people deeply concerned with human rights, we believe it is essential to listen respectfully when occupied people speak about war crimes committed against them.

Therefore, we support Donald Boström and Aftonbladet in their decision to publish "Our sons plundered for their organs."

We salute the Swedish government's refusal to submit to Israeli pressure and undermine the freedom of the press.

We support calls for an investigation and urge the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other competent tribunals to undertake a thorough, impartial investigation of allegations that Israelis have unlawfully removed organs from Palestinians.

CYNTHIA McKINNEY WRITES FROM ISRAELI PRISON

Ramle Prison

by Cynthia McKinney*

July 3, 2009

Ramleh Prison

This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cell block in Ramle.

I am one of the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies ~ and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around.

The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel's Operation ‘Cast Lead' in December 2008, I boarded a Free Gaza boat on one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs ~ new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors.

I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water. It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime. I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons for kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons, then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream ~ like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better .

The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia has been thrown into the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics have become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap.

Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfillment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us.

In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

Ethiopian Jews protesting Israeli racist policies.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months.

As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfillment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. But i am lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cell block. Ask yourself: what are you willing to do?

Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes.

I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

* Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party Presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th. This letter was originally broadcast on WBAIX on July 3rd. For more information, please see http://www.FreeGaza.org

SPIRIT OF HUMANITY ~ JULY 2 UPDATE

Gaza-london,
July 2, ( Pal Telegraph)
Sameh Habeeb

The European campaign to end the siege on Gaza (ECESG) called today for international human rights organizations and lobbying groups to organize large protests in front of Israeli embassies across Europe in solidarity with activists of Freegaza Movement.

Activists onboard the humanitarian boat were kidnapped by Israeli naval forces while they were sailing in a peaceful mission to end the siege. The call aims at creating factual movements on the ground to release "the spirit of humanity" activists

The boat was boarded by highly-profiled people like Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize and a former U.S. congressperson, Cynthia McKinney. The vessel was forcibly take to one of the Israeli seaports under direct threats from Naval boats.

Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize was taken against her will and isolated from the rest of the team. The Israeli army didn't care about either her old age nor her position. Two activists were released only while the rest are in Israeli detention of Ramalah.

The exemplary punishment against the activists is a small glimpse of what's happening to 12 thousand Palestinians in Israeli jails.

ECESG is organizing today a number of protests in various European countries to call on releasing the kidnapped peace activists. Protests would be held in Denmark, Italy, Holland and Sweden

Sameh Habeeb, spokesman of (ECESG), said that the issue is not only showing solidarity for the activists but also for 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip with no basics.

According to Habeeb, the way Israel treated the activists show the confusions and fluctuation of Israeli policies towards facing the non-violent resistance actions. The boat was only carrying humanitarian needs, toys for children and small quantities of cement.

"We are going to start mobilizing the mainstream in Europe on popular and official levels. The campaign would form a front of politicians and MPs to release the activists and ending the siege on Gaza".

Ramy Abdu, member of the campaign said that ECESG is working to lobby European MPs to participate in future trips of Freegaza movement. He revealed that some MPs and politicians would be on board of future boats.

He said that contacts are being made at the moment to urge MPs to participate and some of them expressed readiness towards the idea.

GAZA ~ IDF TROOPS KIDNAP 8 PALESTINIAN YOUTHS

WHEN WILL THIS END?
WHY IS THE WORLD SILENT??
NOW THAT THE BOMBS DO NOT FALL ~
DO THEY REALLY BELIEVE THAT
THERE IS PEACE IN PALESTINE?

April 14, 2009 09:28
by Saed Bannoura
IMEMC & Agencies
Eight Palestinian youths were kidnapped and taken to an unknown location following a dawn raid by Israeli soldiers on Madama village, South of the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Hasan Ziyada, a member of the Madama village council, described more than ten military jeeps invading the village in the early hours of the morning. The soldiers broke into several homes, kidnapping ten youths as reported by the Maan News Agency.

The eight youths were identified as Mohammad Ghassan Ziyada, 21, Ahmad Abdul-Ghani Ziyada, 18, Qassem Nassar, 22, Thaher Yousef Al Qitt, 18, Mojahid Yousef Al Qitt, 16, Waheed Ziyada, 17, and Asad Waheed Al Qitt, 17.

Israeli troops in the West Bank ~
I wonder if they felt a need to frisk him as well.

Which image is more pathetic?Men held in prison,thousands of them for no good reason?Or soldiers searching the belongingsof a five year old school boy?

Undercover forces kidnap two residents near Hebron

Tuesday April 14, 2009 05:33
by Saed Bannoura
IMEMC & Agencies

Undercover forces of the Israeli army kidnapped on Monday evening two residents after ambushing their vehicle at the entrance of Ithna village, north of the southern West Bank city of Hebron.

Local sources reported that the two were stopped at a roadblock before the army cuffed and blindfolded them, and took them to an unknown destination.

The two were identified as Samih Mahmoud Al Teet, 37, and Ashraf Bahjat AL Alami, from Beit Ummar town, near Hebron.

The family of Al Teet said that at first four men came to their home asking for Samih. They family gave them his number, and they later on phoned him and claimed that they wanted to a buy a vehicle from him.

They agreed to meet at Safa junction, but the whole arrangement was an ambush as the undercover forces were waiting there, and immediately kidnapped them before taking them to an unknown destination.

On Monday evening, Israeli soldiers closed the northern entrance of Madama for several hours and prevented residents from entering or leaving the village.

The Israeli army kidnaps 8 Palestinian civilians from the West Bank

Wednesday June 18, 2008 14:18
by Ghassan Bannoura
IMEMC News

Israeli sources said that the Israeli army has kidnapped 8 Palestinian civilians during pre dawn invasions targeting West Bank cities and towns on Wednesday.

The sources said that all those kidnapped have political affiliations with Palestinian political factions.

Meanwhile Palestinian sources said that those kidnapped are civilians, the sources added that the kidnappings took place in the northern West Bank city of Hebron, and in the central West Bank city of Ramallah, in addition to Nablus and Jenin in the northern part of the West Bank.

The army said that those kidnapped were taken to detention camps for questioning and gave no further details.