Today's blood libel: Palestinian PM accuses Israeli medical schools of experimenting on Palestinian bodies

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency writes:

Israel is using withheld corpses of Palestinians for use in laboratories of medical schools in flagrant violation of human rights, today said Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.

“The (Israeli) occupation authorities are augmenting the pain of the families bereaved at the loss of their children by withholding the corpses of their children and using them in the laboratories of medical schools in Israeli universities in flagrant violation of human rights, values, principles and scientific ethics,” said Shtayyeh in remarks at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting held in Ramallah.

He called on universities around the world to boycott those Israeli universities involved in the withholding and the exploitation of the corpses of Palestinians killed by Israeli army gunfire in order to put pressure on the Israeli occupation authorities to show respect for the dead Palestinians and to immediately release the dozens of withheld corpses so that their families can bid them farewell in a manner that befits them and respect their feelings.

This is fiction. And it is being repeated in media worldwide.

Usually, Palestinian fantasies about Israel are based on a wild misreading of a tiny kernel of truth, and this is no exception. 

Israel withholds the bodies of Palestinian terrorists for various reasons, often to prevent violent riots at their funerals. The main site that the bodies are held is the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute,whose official name is the L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine. 

The institute is a department of the Israeli Health Ministry and affiliated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tel Aviv.

That affiliation is probably the source of Shtayyeh's blood libel, as there have been previous calls to boycott Tel Aviv University for its affiliation with the forensics institute. Shtayyeh has added the idea that the university uses the corpses in its laboratories, and from there it is easy to expand the lie to all Israeli medical schools. 

Normally, when a prime minister is caught in such an obvious lie, the media would be merciless in calling it out. The leader would be chastened and would be more careful in future statements to avoid embarrassment. 

But Palestinian leaders have no such fear. Even though Israel has more foreign journalists per capita than any other country, and even though this story was reported in English in the official Palestinian news site, there is no media interest in a top public official spouting antisemitic lies.

The Israeli government rarely comments on these fabrications, because they know how the media would handle it. Instead of emphasizing that a Palestinian leader is blatantly lying, the media would detail stories from the 1990s when Israel did remove corneas and other tissues from a small number of bodies of Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers, a practice that ended decades ago. Readers would end up with the impression that there is something to the story, and probably Israel is doing really bad things to these bodies today, and how awful it is to withhold bodies of terrorists anyway. 

This underlying hate for Israel is the reason that Palestinian leaders can lie with impunity.

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