TEL AVIV – A German university is offering a course that claims Israel’s military harvests organs from Palestinians and the Jewish state is committing genocide, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The academic seminar, called “The Social Situation of Youths in Palestine,” taught at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HAWK) in Hildesheim, contains anti-Semitic material, the German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung alleged.
Rebecca Seidler, an academic who was picked to conduct the seminar, told the paper that the university’s administration dismissed her claims that the course material was anti-Israel.
According to Seidler, one of the study texts was entitled: “Our sons were robbed of their organs.”
Seidler added that the syllabus showed “a picture of a genocide on the Palestinians, an ethnic cleansing, as well as a complete disenfranchisement of Palestinians by Israel.”
It also covered “victims of torture in Israeli prisons,” was riddled with “anti-Semitic stereotypes,” and contained an anti-Israel essay lifted from the rightwing extremist magazine Compact.
However, the dean of the faculty of Social Work and Health, Christa Paulini, told the paper that Seidler was being overly sensitive.
HAWK’s president Christiane Dienel told the German wire service DPA on Friday that an ethics commission found that the seminar in “no way propagates anti-Semitic or anti-Israel content.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said the lie that Israelis harvest organs is 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.
Germany isn’t the first country to disseminate the libel. In 2010, a Swedish daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, published an article charging Israeli soldiers with kidnapping Palestinians in order to harvest their organs.
In response, the ADL wrote: “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.”
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