December 22, 2009

Israel does not discriminate?

What? That can't be right, can it? Well apparently it is true that Israel did not discriminate when it came to harvesting body parts from dead people without consent. The Guardian has just had to run one of its famed "Corrections and clarifications" following the headline, "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs". The headline now appears so, Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent.

Here's how it all appears in the Corrections and clarifications section:
We should not have put the headline "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs" on a story about an admission, by the former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv, that during the 1990s specialists at the institute harvested organs from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers without getting permission from the families of the deceased (21 December, page 15). That headline did not match the article, which made clear that the organs were not taken only from Palestinians. This was a serious editing error and the headline has been changed online to reflect the text of the story written by the reporter.
There was nothing wrong with the original headline. It was correct, Israel did harvest Palestinian organs. The fact that the Palestinians are a captive population and that most of those killed by Israel have been innocent civilians does compound the scandal of what Israel did. Of course, harvesting body parts without consent is always a scandal in societies where organs are only donated with consent from either the deceased or their families but nicking the body parts from people who, while alive, are treated under the law as racially inferior is a far greater scandal and far more newsworthy.

I wonder who got the headline changed.

No comments:

Post a Comment