Donald Boström, the Swedish journalist whose article accusing Israel Defense Forces soldiers of killing Palestinians to obtain their organs evoked outrage, denied on Tuesday that he was motivated by anti-Semitism.
"I'm very sad to hear people accuse me of anti-Semitism," Boström told Haaretz on Tuesday.
Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, ran Bostrom's piece under the headline, "They plunder the organs of our sons". In the wake of the report and the furious public reaction, the Israeli embassy in Stockholm on Wednesday sent a sternly-worded diplomatic protest to the Swedish government.
Boström's article makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.
"Now that [the story] has once again risen to the surface, I wanted to point out the link [to the New Jersey affair] and the fact that there needs to be an investigation of the claims," Boström said.
Boström said he had offered the story to another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, which turned it down "with no explanation."
The reporter said Aftonbladet, the most popular evening tabloid in Sweden, published the article without making any editorial changes.
Asa Linderborg, an editor of the newspaper's culture section which printed the story, told Haaretz that the publication "stands behind the demand for an international inquiry."
"We had many discussions on whether to publish the article or not, and to the best of my knowledge, there are no facts there that are incorrect," Linderborg said... Full story
Israel furious over Swedish newspaper article
AP - Matti Friedman
Israeli and Swedish officials responded furiously Wednesday to a Swedish newspaper article that suggested Israeli troops had killed Palestinians and harvested their organs.
The article published in the Aftonbladet newspaper on Monday, headlined "Our sons are plundered for their organs," implies a link between those charges and the recent arrest in the U.S. of an American Jew for illicit organ trafficking.
The story made headlines in Israel, where some commentators compared it to medieval accusations that Jews killed Christian children for their blood...
... The article was illustrated with photographs of a dead Palestinian man with a line of surgical stitches running the length of his torso, apparently taken after an autopsy, as well as pictures of stone-throwing youths and Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a New York resident arrested in an FBI sting last month and charged with plotting to buy a kidney from an Israeli and sell it to an American patient for $160,000... Full story
2007 Ha'aretz story on Israeli professor who found evidence for "blood libel":
Bar-Ilan prof. defiant on blood libel book 'even if crucified'
Ha'aretz - 12/02/2007
The author of a book on the use of blood by Jews in Ashkenazi communities in the Middle Ages said Sunday, in the face of the furor its publication aroused, "I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me."
In an interview with Haaretz from Rome, Professor Ariel Toaff said he stood behind the contention of his book, "Pasque di Sangue," just published in Italy, that there is a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews. However, he said he was sorry his arguments had been twisted.
"I tried to show that the Jewish world at that time was also violent, among other things because it had been hurt by Christian violence," the Bar-Ilan history professor said. Of course I do not claim that Judaism condones murder. But within Ashkenazi Judaism there were extremist groups that could have committed such an act and justified it," he said.
Toaff said he reached his conclusions after coming across testimony from the trial for the murder of a Christian child, Simon of Trento, in 1475, which in the past was believed to have been falsified. "I found there were statements and parts of the testimony that were not part of the Christian culture of the judges, and they could not have been invented or added by them... Full story
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