German University's course claims Israel harvests Palestinian organs

Academic material reportedly says Israel commits genocide.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
Updated: JULY 25, 2016 00:08
Doctors perform surgery [illustrative]. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Doctors perform surgery [illustrative].
(photo credit: REUTERS)
BERLIN – An academic seminar at a German university claims Israel’s military harvests organs from Palestinians and the Jewish state is responsible for a genocide.
“Our sons were robbed of their organs,” was the title of a part of the seminar’s course material, Rebecca Seidler, an academic who blew the whistle on the anti-Israel material, told the weekly German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung in an article published Thursday.
The paper reported that the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HAWK) offers a course on “The Social Situation of Youths in Palestine,” which contains the allegedly anti-Semitic material.
After reviewing the content of the course, Seidler, who was slated to conduct the seminar, complained to the university’s management.
The dean of the faculty of Social Work and Health, Christa Paulini, dismissed Seidler’s criticism in a telephone conversation as being overly sensitive.
Seidler told the JAZ that material showed “a picture of a genocide on the Palestinians, an ethnic cleansing, as well as a complete disenfranchisement of Palestinians by Israel.”
The seminar syllabus also covered the “victims of torture in Israeli prisons,” said Seidler. The seminar conveyed “anti-Semitic stereotypes,” JAZ wrote.
Queries to the HAWK media department on Sunday by The Jerusalem Post were not immediately returned. HAWK instructor Ibtissam Köhler prepared the seminar material, which also contained an anti-Israel essay from a rightwing extremist magazine titled “Compact.”
The seminar was slated for the 2015/2016 semester. It is unclear how long the HAWK has conducted anti-Israel seminars.
The HAWK is located in Hildesheim, a small city in the state of Lower Saxony, Germany, with a population of nearly 100,000.
HAWK’s president Christiane Dienel told the German wire service DPA on Friday that an ethics commission examined the seminar and it in “no way propagates anti-Semitic or anti-Israel content.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York City, an organization that combats anti-Semitism, termed the allegation of harvesting organs to be a “new blood libel.”
“The allegation that Jews murder non-Jews to use their blood for ritual or medicinal purposes dates back to the Middle Ages and has spawned many variants over time,” the ADL wrote on its website.
In 2010, the ADL said: “The false and malicious report in a Swedish newspaper that Israeli soldiers abducted and killed Palestinians, including children, to harvest their organs has mushroomed into a global conspiracy theory. Within months, the story has generated several conspiracy theories about various Jewish plots to harvest organs from victims around the globe, including from kidnapped Algerian and Ukrainian children and from Haitians pulled from the rubble of the earthquake that devastated their nation.”


Related Tags
israel and germany