Palestinian Officials Continue to Promote Antisemitic Blood Libel

Riyad Mansour

Officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling Fatah party are falsely claiming that Israel steals body parts from dead terrorists.

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), Gaza and eastern Jerusalem, several PA officials and Fatah movement members have recently put forward the modern-day incarnation of an age-old libel. Fatah is the major component of the authority.

The blood libel was the medieval-era false accusation that Jews murdered Gentile children to use their blood for religious purposes. This slander has taken many forms and its dissemination has historically been followed by murders of Jews, sometimes in large numbers.

CAMERA has noted (“Palestinian T.V. Favorite Accuses Israel of ‘Harvesting’ Terrorists’ Organs,” Nov. 11, 2015) that PA officials have been promoting the libel. These have included Riyad Mansour, the PA’s Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations. Mansour is frequently treated by news media as a reliable source. He sent a letter to the president of the U.N. Security Council, claiming that bodies of Palestinian terrorists killed “were returned without corneas and other organs.”

More recently, other Palestinian Arab officials have joined Mansour to claim that Israel harvests organs.

On Nov. 17, 2015, the PA ambassador to Bahrain, Khaled Aref, claimed in Al-Hayat Al-Hadid (the PA’s official daily newspaper) that Israel “steals the Marytrs’ organs, and sells them.”

According to PMW, on December 24, members of the dormant Palestinian Legislative Council further disseminated the blood libel by calling for autopsies on terrorists killed “in order to know if the Martyrs’ organs have been stolen [by Israel] and to legally prosecute the occupation.”

The last elections for the PLC took place on Jan. 25, 2006. Subsequent elections have been indefinitely postponed by PA leadership.

PMW reports that Fatah Central Committee member Jamal Muhaisen claimed on official PA T.V. on December 27:

“There are Israeli testimonies acknowledging that organs are being taken from the bodies of young Martyrs. While the body is with the Israelis, organs are taken according to Israel’s needs, and afterwards they hand over the body [to the PA].”

Muhaisen appeared along with Mukeimar Abu Sa’ada, a “political science lecturer”, on a T.V. program called “Topic of the Day.” Like Mansour, he also has been a media source.

Sa’ada previously has been a guest on KCRW, a National Public Radio member station that broadcasts in the greater Los Angeles Area. According to KCRW’s Web site, Sa’ada appeared as a guest for two episodes (“The High Price of Saving a Single Soldier,” Dec. 23, 2009 and “Israel, Gaza and the Prospects for Peace,” Jan. 7, 2009). On KCRW’s tax-payer subsidized program, Sa’ada implied that Israeli soldiers intentionally targeted children during Israel’s 2008-09 war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Seeking to imply undue legitimacy, he also referred to members of Hamas, a U.S.-listed terrorist group, as “resistance fighters.”

Adding to its recent promotion of antisemitic canards like those that have encouraged violence against Jews, PMW notes that Fatah celebrated its 51st anniversary by broadcasting a “documentary” on official PA TV that connects official PA propaganda with that of Nazi Germany. The program opens with:

“[Europe] suffered a tragedy by providing refuge for the Jews…Faced with the Jews’ schemes, Europe could not bear their character traits, monopolies, corruption, and their control and climbing up positions in government.”

In his Jan. 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler flogged similar claims of secret Jewish conspiracies and influence, declaring:

“During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be…the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

When it comes to antisemitism, what’s old is new or newly used again—from leaders of the Third Reich to leaders of the Palestinian Authority.