Soccer Dad

Two sides to a blood libel

The New York Times seems to feel that there are two sides to the charges in a Swedish newspaper that the IDF kills Palestinians and takes their organs for transplants. Read Accusation of Organ Theft Stokes Ire in Israel. "Stokes Ire?" Is that what's news?

As the furor in Israel over the article gathered into a diplomatic storm revolving around questions of anti-Semitism and freedom of speech, Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the article, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, was "outrageous" and compared it to a "blood libel," referring to medieval anti-Semitic accusations that Jews ritually killed gentile children and collected their blood.

"We are not asking the government of Sweden for an apology," Mr. Netanyahu said, according to an official who attended the cabinet meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We are asking for their condemnation. We are not asking from them anything we do not ask of ourselves."

Why is "blood libel" in scare quotes? Maybe it's something that is traced to medieval times but it has had a long, continuous and shameful history.

But what bugs me most about the article is how the reporter, Isabel Kershner, goes out of her way to explain why the charge may be credible.

The article, by the Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom, ran on an inside page of the newspaper on Aug. 17. It was based on accusations Mr. Bostrom heard from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s, and which he published in a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2001. Mr. Seaman said Mr. Bostrom last worked here in 2006.

Mr. Bostrom apparently revived the allegations by linking them to the July arrests of 44 people in New Jersey in a major corruption and international money laundering conspiracy that included several assemblymen, mayors and rabbis. One of its members, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, faces charges of conspiring to broker the illegal sale of a human kidney for transplant.

Aftonbladet followed up on Sunday with an article about one of the Palestinian families at the center of the original accusations.

So were the charges in the 90's true? Kershner didn't report that. (She also didn't report that the charges echoed an incident in a Turkish movie of a few years ago.)

And of course the article also takes pains to inform us that Israel's reaction has been counterproductive. Some other details that are missing were noted by Barry Rubin:

And then there is the Swedish governmental complicity in this matter, since the original accusations were made in a book subsidized with its funds. There's also far more behind the surface. For example, there is now a whispering campaign about alleged Jewish influence in Sweden, including personal attacks on the country's ambassador to Israel for issuing a very carefully worded semi-apology.

Finally, this affair is only one of a number of such stories appearing simultaneously. In the focus on Sweden, an equally bad blood libel story in the Netherlands' leading newspaper is being ignored. It accuses Jews of being Satan-worshippers who spread the swine flu. No, that's not an exaggeration.

So here is how the system works. Palestinians or other Arabs or other Muslims, individuals or groups, tell incredible lies about Israel and then these are uncritically published in Western media. Aren't reporters supposed to examine stories for accuracy BEFORE they are published? And aren't editors supposed to critically look at what their publishing to see if it is credible?

So then it turns out that the Swedish government - not just the newspaper - is complicit in spreading the libel and the incident is a sign of a general obliviousness to outrageous claims made against Israel and Jews. It is the sign of a level of tolerance for the antisemitism, even in the enlightened West. The ire over this incident shouldn't be confined to Israel. It is absent from the New York Times.

Crossposted on Yourish.