Organs, organs
The following article is so important that I chose to reprint it here (with permission), in order to give it the widest possible distribution. I’ve taken the liberty of changing some of the links in the original version for more complete or authoritative citations — editor
A subject for an objective academic study
With the launching last month of David Matas and David Kilgour’s book “Bloody Harvest,” every fair minded person must wonder why there has been no public outrage at its gruesome revelation of wide-scale harvesting of organs from live prisoners of conscience in China. The authors estimate that 41,500 organ transplants using Falun Gong prisoners have been done in the past five years. Their vital organs were seized involuntarily for sale at high prices, sometimes to foreigners, who normally face long waits for voluntary donations of such organs in their home countries.
This is not merely a journalist’s report that can be taken lightly. Matas is a lawyer who received the Order of Canada for his human rights work, and Kilgour is a former crown prosecutor and former Member of Parliament.
The allegations are not new. According to the British Medical Journal of Nov. 24, 2001 prisoners in China can be executed for crimes such as black market activities, in addition to murder. Ambulances wait at the site of the executions and the fresh organs from healthy young persons are harvested, to be transplanted into recipients from abroad.
10,000 African Albinos in hiding
And why, one must ask, is there no outrage at reports by the International Federation for the Red Cross and Crescent societies, that 10,000 Albinos have gone into hiding in East Africa because of the common belief that body parts of albinos have magical powers?
India’s Black Market in Organs
And are we too indifferent to express outrage at India’s black market organ scandal as reported in Time magazine of Feb. 1, 2008, revealing an organ transplant ring that has been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes? Doctors pay $1000 for the kidneys and sell them for $37,500. Another massive transplant ring in Punjab was uncovered in 2003. Police there believe at least 30 of the donors, died, despite promises that they would receive excellent post-operation medical care. Some donors were forcibly brought to clinics at gunpoint and forced to undergo operations that they didn’t want.
In 2000, pathologist Dick Van Velzen at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool confessed to removing hundreds of thousands of organs from children’s bodies and storing them in hospitals all over the country. In addition to over 2,000 hearts, there were a large number of brain parts, eyes taken from over 15,000 stillborn foetuses and perhaps most disturbingly of all, a number of children’s heads and bodies.
And there was not even a hint of outrage when Mideast Dispatch Archive reported on May 11, 2004 that body parts of six murdered Israelis were paraded around in Gaza as trophies by Palestinian mobs, including members of the PA security forces. Some even played football with body parts in the street. One disembodied head was placed on a table so television cameras could film it close up.
Love of the Land: Organs, organs
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