Ringworm children, from fact to "theory"

Phew! that was close. I just had a little run-in on Comment is free where Lyn Julius has quite a nasty racist article on the case of Jews from Arab countries. I mentioned the case of the ringworm children where thousands of Jewish children from Arab states with or without ringworm were given massive doses of radiation to "cure" them. Well a chap calling himself Sabraguy came at me with some friendly advice to be careful with my sources:

@ilan [that's me at Cif]

"The way Israel treated new arrivals from Arab states was very different from how they treated Europeans, often spraying the newcomers with DDT and subjecting the so-called "Ringworm children" to medical experiments to rival those of Dr Mengele."

I am sorry to disappoint you because I know you would like to believe this, but it is a lie, throughly debunked here:
http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2007/03/ringworm_hoax.html
The pepetrator, a conspiracy theorist called Barry Chamish is a total fruitcake. One of his delusions is that Yoko Ono was behind the assassination of John Lennon. He also claims to haqve uncovered a Vatican plot to re-establish Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. (this is why Europe wants Israel out of Jerusalem apparently). You can read these startling revelations on his own Website:
http://www.thebarrychamishwebsite.com/lectures.htm
Chamish also thinks hurricane Katrina was a punishment for ISrael's withdrawal from Gaza:

Perhaps the first to publicly connect Katrina to the Gaza evacuation was famed Israeli conspiracy theorist Barry Chamish, who sent a mass e-mail noting, "GUsh is like GUlf, and KATif is like KATrina. If you take 'KAT' from KATif and KATrina, you are left with 'IF' and 'RAIN.' If you support Gush Katif evacuation, it will rain."

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46220
I'd be a bit more careful who you quote if I were you.

Well I usually am quite careful, as loose cannons go. I mean I don't just run with the first allegation against Israel that I see. This is a fertile ground for conspiracy theories and there are people who will believe and say anything about Israel as long as it makes Israel look bad. The trouble with people like that is that when they get exposed, it has the ordinarily difficult result of making Israel look good. But this guy had me slightly worried. I say "slightly" because I remembered who had drawn my attention to the ringworm children affair and he's a generally, that is always, reliable source so I was pretty confident but slightly worried.

I started my response while I got a-googling. Oh no! Did you see? Some general stuff about ringworm and children before you get to the ringworm children. There's even a post from Harry's Place that, without checking, is presumably a gloat about the ringworm story being a hoax and there are links to an article by, yes, Barry Chamish, who does indeed have a reputation for promoting wacky conspiracy theories. I was encouraged to find a link to Wikipedia on the affair but one of its links was to Barry Chamish and you'd be surprised what slips through the net at Wikipedia. Another of its links to google video was broken or no longer there. I was getting worried now. Again in Wikipedia I tried a couple more links. How about the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles? Not Found. Ulp! Ok, calm calm calm, what's a little slap down on Comment is free? Most readers must know it's a zionist troll site and that's just the articles. And the comments section is worse even than the articles.

But then I remembered getting hits from people googling "ringworm children" and that when I tracked back to google there were articles in Ha'aretz. I googled ringworm haaretz, just like that, no quotes. The first two were both something I could run with so back I came with among other things a few useful links:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/310/6976/350/a
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=687500

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787468.html

and a quote from one of them:

Twelve years ago, Israel recognized its responsibility for the destructive results of this unwarranted irradiation, including scarring of the scalp, baldness, premature tooth loss, and benign and malignant tumors. The Israel Tinea Capitis Compensation Law states that those who can prove to a Health Ministry committee of experts that they were irradiated as children are entitled to compensation in accordance with the damage to their health

What is truly remarkable is how a matter of such public interest and so publicly documented can be so publicly lied about by zionists. Actually in fairness to this Sabraguy, he may be a dupee rather than a duper but a guy calling himself a sabra, that is a Jew who was born in Israel/Palestine, surely reads the papers there and I am not sure that any reputable source has denied this glaring example of an Israeli atrocity. And ok, the guy was effectively anonymous so he doesn't look silly being so silly, but it does suggest a deep seated culture of dishonesty where people pop up on message boards armed with bogus book and site references that are all time consuming to check or they get away with the lies and smears if you don't.

Anyway, they're still taking comments there and the old GIYUS software is in overdrive as usual so the zionist trolls are out in force.

I just checked the Cif site again and there have been a few responses to my response to sabraguy. My fave is this but I can't post it here, this being a family blog and all. Oh dear, too late (as at 12.04 pm 26/6/08). The Cif mods have deleted the "criticism". I thought the target of the abuse had to complain for that to happen. They're a funny lot at Cif.

No they're not. Now, at 13.17 they've deleted the comment by me that I linked above. Nearly 5,000 characters, no breach of their rules, nothing. And I didn't save it. There's just my name and a note to say "This comment has been removed". That seems to be what usually happens if a comment is removed unless you get banned altogether as happened to me, it seems, many moons ago. But what about my man Sabraguy? His comment, fairly inoccuous if a little condescending, was a response to the comment of mine that got deleted. Whadya know? They've not just deleted his comment, they've deleted his name from the thread as well. Why such different treatment? When that happened to me it signified that I had been banned but this guy hasn't been banned. Not only that, they've left my response to him in tact, possibly not for long, so here it is:

Sabraguy

The case of the Ringworm children did not originate with Barry Chamish nor did the case of Israel bombing or attempting to bomb Jewish, American and British owned premises in various Arab cities and nor do the many cases of zionist collaboration with the nazis from Hitler coming to power through to the round-up of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Considering the amount Israel has to hide in terms of the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs and the sheer cruelty visited upon diaspora Jews when it needs more cannon fodder for the "demographic problem" Israel is remarkably open.

The case of the ringworm children has been covered in a prize winning documentary aired on Israeli tv and admitted to in the Knesset, the bombing of Jewish premises in Baghdad by Israeli agents has also been admitted to in the Knesset and the Lavon affair, zionist terrorism against US and UK targets in Egypt, was even owned up to by Ariel Sharon. That latter was one of the only two times that Sharon told the truth about anything. The other time was when he told Yediot Ahranot that the disengagement from Gaza was a "punishment and not a reward" for the Palestinians. Surprise surprise!! even the liberal Guardian missed that one.

Anyway, Sabraguy, I am grateful for you challenging what I suspect you knew to be the truth. In my checking I discovered that the Knesset actually passed a law to compensate the victims of the medical experiments from which so many Jewish children and succeeding generations (where they weren't sterilised by the experiment) have suffered. Whether the compensation truly compensates or goes the way of holocaust compensation is another story.

Here are some important links on the Ringworm children:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/310/6976/350/a

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=687500
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787468.html

The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has been accused of antisemitism by zionists so you might use that as an excuse to ignore it but Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, isn't so easy to pin that false charge on:

Here's a quote from one of several Ha'aretz articles:

"Twelve years ago, Israel recognized its responsibility for the destructive results of this unwarranted irradiation, including scarring of the scalp, baldness, premature tooth loss, and benign and malignant tumors. The Israel Tinea Capitis Compensation Law states that those who can prove to a Health Ministry committee of experts that they were irradiated as children are entitled to compensation in accordance with the damage to their health."

Now then Sabraguy, it is true that Israel provides a fertile ground for conspiracy theories but sometimes the conspiracies are facts that the nutty theorists can then use to give credibility to their concocted stories. The ringworm children is one such case that is too well documented by Israeli sources to deny.

There is a conspiracy theory around the ringworm affair that isn't true. It's the idea that zionists are so in denial they have removed stories about it from the internet. That's true of some, but thanks to Ha'aretz, not all.

So there's a comment firming up on my deleted one, addressing a guy, indeed a Sabraguy who has been disappeared from the thread altogether.

But I was still anxious that zionists were desperate to bury this story so I had another pop naming Sabraguy again. It's here. Not my best but I'll post it lest it too disappears:

There is a danger here that one of the more grotesque crimes Israel committed against Jews from Arab countries, ie, the ringworm children affair, is going to be covered up by trolls and bogus websites googlebombing so that when people google words like "ringworm", "children" and "Israel" the troll or zionist smearsites will appear in most of the top ten or twenty. But keep looking and you will find these:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=687500

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787468.html

These articles in Ha'aretz are not speculative or theoretical, they are simply hard factual reporting. Goodness! there is even a law in Israel with regard to compensation for these.crimes and still the hasbaristas are in denial..

What Sabraguy inadvertently drew attention to is an accessory (or accessories) after the fact of the radiation poisoning of thousands of Jewish children. If zionists cared as much about Jews as they pretend to, they would protest about the treatment of the ringworm children, not cover it up, not smear its critics.

Anyway, apologies for the self-indulgence but I put a lot into the one that got deleted and I actually got emails from a couple of people I haven't corresponded with for some time now, saying that they had seen and were impressed by what I wrote and the bloody Guardian deleted it, I'm guessing, on someone's say so. And why did they remove Sabraguy's name and comment and only my comment? I've written to ask them but on past performance on not expecting a true answer, in fact I'm not expecting an answer.

By the way, you've seen Sabraguy's comment addressed to me. Here are all his comments to the Guardian. He seems to be a hasbara specialist.