Friday, February 12, 2010

Jenny Tonge "sacked as health spokesperson"

Writing on the Jewish Chronicle website, Martin Bright reports:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has sacked controversial peer Jenny Tonge as the party’s health spokesperson in the Lords over her demands for an investigation into allegations of body parts harvesting by the Israeli Defence force in Haiti.

Her remarks followed an article making the accusations in the online journal Palestine Telegraph, of which Baroness Tonge is a patron.

I cannot find the article on the Palestine Telegraph website, but I presume it relates to this clip on Youtube. Surely the corneas have been sent to Haiti, not harvested there?

Bright also says that Jenny's comments "prompted outrage from fellow Liberal Democrats who put immediate pressure on Mr Clegg to act against Baroness Tonge". Unfortunately, he does not say who these Liberal Democrats were or offer any evidence of this outrage.

4 comments:

Paul Evans said...

I was certainly pretty pissed off. Tonge's hatred seems to know no depths.

Martin Bright said...

Read today's JC for the Lib Dems who were outraged

Onlinefocus Team said...

Surfing, I see Ed Fordham and Matthew Harris for starters.

And me too, for what it's worth.

She brings the whole party into disrepute....

Peter Reilly said...

Why should Baroness Tonge be reprimanded for calling for investigations of allegations that the Israeli Courts are themselves investigating?

There are three lawsuits ongoing in Israel at the present moment concerning the Forensic Institute and Dr. Hiss, over alleged abuses against dead bodies, including that of Rachel Corrie, the US citizen who was run over in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer whilst trying to stop the demolition of a doctor’s house in Gaza.

Moreover, extensive investigations have been made by Organ Watch, an organization dedicated to research on the global traffic in human organs, which found that much of the world's illicit traffic in kidneys could be traced to Israel.

One if the founder members of Organ Watch is the much respected Nancy Scheper-Hughs, professor of anthropology at the University of California.

She was the person who informed the FBI of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers in Israel, which led to arrests several years later.

In the course of her investigations she audiotaped interview with the director of Israel’s National Forensic Institute, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, at Abu Kabir, in which he openly and freely discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from the bodies of the dead brought to the Institute for examination and autopsy.

In a 2008 lecture, she identified two motivations of Israeli traffickers as "greed" and "Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust." She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her "it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’

In December 2009, after the Aftonbladet-Israel controversy, Israel acknowledged that organs had been taken from during the 1990s at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute without the families' permission, from deceased Israelis, Palestinians, and foreign workers.

Further information can be found at: http://www.counterpunch.com/hughes10252010.html