While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.This is a bloggy and speculative article about Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians to harvest their organs. This is inaccurate. Contrast this with what the AP reported, and also how they reported it. There is a marked and distinct difference between what is being reported in both articles. I do not understand the confusion.
Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.
...
We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.
It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.
Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.In other words the military admitted that it was a "practice" to do this in the past - not the criminal behavior of some off-the-reservation lunatics. Because if it was the actions of a few rogue doctors, the military couldn't state definitively that it "does not happen any longer."
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.
Controversy.
HAN: Han Solo. I'm captain of the Millennium Falcon. Chewie here tells me you're looking for passage to the Alderaan system.1Let's not go there.
BEN: Yes, indeed. If it's a fast ship.
HAN: Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
BEN: Should I have?
HAN: It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs!
BEN: But a parsec is a measure of distance. I was asking about speed.
LUKE: I once bulls-eyed a womp rat in less than four hours.
CHEWBACCA: Grrar! [let us ignore this one's digressive statement]
HAN: I know that. Listen, kid, you might learn something. On second thought, nevermind. See, me and Chewie here spent a whole week in the guts of the nav system plotting out this beautiful shortcut. Normally you have to go around Kessel Secundus and that's 5 parsecs out of your way. "Everybody knows the Kessel Run is slightly less than 17 parsecs." "You want to do the Kessel Run, you have to go about 17 parsecs, give or take." "Waa-waa I'm Greedo even I know the Kessel Run's some amount shy of 17 parsecs long."
CHEWBACCA: Grrarr! [how wrong they were]
BEN: But did it actually take less time? I mean, less time than normal, in your ship in particular, somehow?
HAN: Not important. All I'm saying at this point is that my ship is famous for doing that.
BEN: Couldn't anyone do that shortcut though? A Jawa1 freighter could do those less than 12 parsecs in a hundred years, that doesn't make their ship fast. And if you know a shortcut to Alderaan, maybe you should have led with that—even though I still don't know how that relates to the actual speed of your ship, or why you think your ship would have notoriety for taking a shortcut, unless you used it to win some sort of race, in which case you should have told me about that and not the way you cheated to win it.
HAN: If it makes you feel better, we can pretend that I had to fly in between two black holes or something that requires a lot of speed. Why are you so hung up on this?
LUKE: My chair doesn't work!
BEN: Aha! I think I understand. Perhaps it is the case that your ship has separate reputations, both for being fast and for pioneering this Kessel Run improvement. However, the fame for the latter is the greater. Therefore you were not implying that your ship is fast because it pioneered the Kessel Run; you were merely shocked that beyond my ignorance of the Falcon's reputation for speed—beyond that and separate from that—I did not recognize the ship at all, not even for its signal accomplishment.
HAN: Yeah, of course. What conversation were you in? I thought you'd gone senile.
BEN: Moreover, so steeped are you in your smuggler's lore (and/or the myth of your own fame) you couldn't take the next step to imagine that we hadn't heard of the Kessel Run at all. This explains my conclusion that you somehow thought a parsec was a unit of time. I thought briefly that you were trying to dazzle me with patois—but surely no one is stupid enough to try to pass a well-known unit of distance as a unit of time, especially not to someone who'd just cold-bloodedly maimed a man.
HAN: Sure, make it my fault, asshole.
i quiet ly think
poetry magnetic
a rose bloom s
fart chocolate dream sposted by cortex (staff) at 8:30 AM on December 22, 2009 [7 favorites]
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:14 PM on December 20, 2009