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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |
| PA minister claims Israel harvests Palestinian organs | |
| 2011-08-30 | |
| The Paleostinian Authority Minister of Prisoner Affairs Issa Qaraqi' was quoted Sunday as saying Israel is the "major harvesting and trading center" of body organs in the world. His comments come even as the Defense Ministry is recommending to the government the release of a few hundred Paleostinian prisoners to PA President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... in September to try and create a better atmosphere in the West Bank. The prisoner release is part of a number of steps being discussed, including the return of the bodies of bully boyz buried in Israel, whose goal is to improve the overall attitude on the Paleostinian streets in advance of September. Saudi-based Arab News.com reported Sunday that Qaraqi', "during the national day of Paleostinian campaign to retrieve deaders' bodies," accused Israel of harvesting parts from "the bodies of dead Paleostinian deaders without the consent of their families." According to the website, Qaraqi' said Israel was holding on to the remains of "Paleostinian deaders to conceal the crimes it committed against the deaders' bodies and to punish their families." Claiming that Israel was "holding the remains of 338 Arab and Paleostinian fighters" in secret cemeteries, he said the "holding of the deaders' remains for many years casts doubts and accusations that Israel assassinated them after detention, or harvested their organs."
But experts are skeptical about a new law banning the practice of paying for human organs, as poverty, ignorance ensure a supply of donors. A new law that aims to stop Egypt’s poor from selling their kidneys and other organs faces an uphill battle as the country’s deteriorating economy pushes more and more people into making desperate and dangerous decisions to raise money.  The new law, which went into effect this month after years of debate, bans the practice of paying money for human organs and restricts donations from live donors to family members of the fourth degree. That, in effect, bans foreigners from receiving transplants. Removing organs without government authorization will be treated as first-degree murder. Transplant procedures for the poor will be financed by the State. Egypt is one of the last countries of the Arab world to implement organ-transplant legislation. As lawmakers dawdled and religious scholars debated the definition of death, the country became a hub for regional trafficking in organs, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).  “After the revolution people are talking much more about human dignity and ending poverty. There is much more awareness that selling an organ isn’t the equivalent of donating blood,” Sherine Hamdy, whose book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt will be published next January, told The Media Line, “On the other hand, the economic situation is pretty severe …That’s a problem to be addressed.”  For many, a couple of thousand dollars for a kidney – even if the amount ultimately paid was typically less than promised – meant debts could be paid off or enough money accumulated to start a business in an economy were unemployment is in the double digits and growing.  A woman identified as Aisha recalls her bitter experience selling her kidney. “My financial circumstances became very difficult and I didn’t know what to do. Some people told me to donate my kidney and get money. I went to a lab and they told me I would get money for donating my kidney and that nothing would happen to me physically,” she recalled in a filmed interview for Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions, an organization combating the trafficking of humans for organs.  But after she completed the operation, her health never quite recovered and she could no longer work. Her husband abandoned the family, taking the proceeds. “I lost my kidney, my money, everything,” she said.  Hamdy, who is an anthropologist at Brown University, said that because transplants have lived in a legal twilight zone, people who were victimized couldn’t turn to the law.  “A lot of times you have people coming to police claiming their organs were stolen,” she said. “Often what happened was that people were promised larger sums of money than they were delivered or that the operation was much less risky than it (ultimately) was. Not wanting to incriminate themselves as having sold their organ, they would claim their organs were stolen. But prosecutors hadn’t yet been able to do anything because of the absence of a law.”  If anything, however, the economic pressures that helped create the problem have been magnified by the collapse of the Egyptian economy by the protests and strikes that brought down President Hosni Mubarak in February and continue to this day. The government has promised big increases in subsidies and other welfare spending, but it doesn’t have the means to pay for it.  A survey by the US-based International Republic Institute in April found that 41% of those polled said they have trouble covering their basic needs and feeding their families.  Susanne Lundin, a professor of ethnology at Sweden’s Lund University who studies the global organ trade, told The Media Line that the new law is unlikely to deter either demand for or supply of organs, and instead will drive the market underground as has happened in other countries that passed similar legislation.  Egypt is one of a handful countries identified by the World Health Organization as organ-trafficking hot spots. Others like China, Pakistan and the Philippines have outlawed organ sales and barred foreigners from undergoing transplants to stop transplant tourism. Even before the law went into effect, Cairo was cracking down on the phenomenon, but even that effort stalled amid the chaos surrounding Mubarak’s fall from power.  The Philippines passed its law in 2007 but just four years later finds itself debating how to revise it.  “It didn’t work at all. The illegal trade grew much more after that. So now the Philippines are trying to revaluate it and legalize people coming to buy organs. There is a big fight underway,” Lundin said. “When it was legal or half legal for foreigners to come, they could do it openly. When they were excluded they had no choice but to do it on the black market.” | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 Egypt Clamps Down on Organ Trafficking Does that mean no Wurlitzers to through the Gazan's tunnels???? |
| Posted by: USN,Ret. 2011-08-30 23:52 |
| #1 They should start drinking alcohol. Then the evil juice wouldn't be after their livers. |
| Posted by: Spot 2011-08-30 07:47 |