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A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.

An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorised genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients unable to give informed consent or without obtaining health ministry approval.

At one hospital, staff pierced children’s eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.

Israel’s health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was “shocked” at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel’s hospitals.

Dr Jacques Michel, the former director of Hadassah hos pital who triggered the comptroller’s inquiry with a public warning about the abuses in 2001, yesterday called for the prosecution of the doctors.

“These doctors should be punished very severely because they really are criminals,” said Dr Michel, who is head of the committee that approves medical experimentation at Hadassah, which is not among the accused hospitals.

“They should be stripped of their licences to practise and they should be prosecuted. If you don’t show by example that the medical profession does not accept this kind of conduct the phenomenon will go on and on.

“It’s not an isolated phenomenon. It spread through different institutions.”

The state comptroller, Eliezer Goldberg, found that patients were often not properly informed about the experiments they were agreeing to and, in some cases, not told at all.

Every Israeli hospital has a medical ethics committee to oversee adherence to the 1964 Helsinki code on experimentation. But the comptroller said the committees routinely failed to apply their own regulations and that the health ministry was negligent in enforcing standards.

Mr Goldberg described a series of incidents at Harzfeld geriatric hospital as “extremely grave”, including the cases of a 101-year-old woman and another aged 91 who supposedly consented to experimental drugs without their families being informed.

Researchers applied the thumbprints of seven other patients at Harzfeld to consent forms that they were too senile to read or sign.

“At this age, 25-30% of these people are not fit to give informed consent because they suffer from dementia or senility,” said Dr Michel.

In other cases, doctors were unable to produce the consent forms they said that patients had signed although the law requires researchers to keep the documents for 15 years.

Kaplan hospital conducted painful clinical trials on patients to draw urine samples by needle, a procedure normally reserved for extreme circumstances. The comptroller found that 40% of the patients who signed consent forms — five of them with a fingerprint — were mentally unfit to do so.

[…]

Source:

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Wednesday May 11, 2005

Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1481159,00.html

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Read the full story here.

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

LYON, FRANCE — A French university said Friday it would suspend a professor for five years after he questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers in the Holocaust.

Bruno Gollnisch, No. 2 in the National Front party of extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, already faces a legal probe in France after he questioned how Nazis used the gas chambers and how many Jews were killed.

Lyon University, which is named after Jean Moulin, the hero of the French Resistance murdered by the Nazis in 1943, said Gollnisch would be suspended from his functions as professor of Japanese civilization for five years.

Gollnisch told a news conference Oct. 11 that he recognized gas chambers existed but said he thought historians had yet to decide whether they were actually used to kill Jews.

He called for an open debate about whether the total number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was 6 million as stated.

French Jewish organizations and anti-racism groups have condemned Gollnisch’s remarks.

Gollnisch told reporters Friday he was the victim of a “real witch hunt” and blamed pressure from the government for his suspension.

French prosecutors have opened an investigation into Gollnisch, which focuses on “denying crimes against humanity.”

France’s anti-racism laws have made denying the Holocaust a crime, punishable by fines and prison.

Source: www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2005_3850448

Jan. 18, 2005

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/528450.html

In the summer of 2003, the Knesset promulgated a disgraceful law. The amendment to the Citizenship Law applied a sweeping prevention of unification of families and marriages between Israeli Arabs and Arabs from the region. Since the law was passed by the votes of 53 MKs — including Shinui — there has been a total halt to any requests by Israeli Arab citizens, including those who were already married and had children, to enable them to live in Israel with their relatives.

In effect, the state left its Arab citizens only one choice: to live in another country with their non-Israeli spouses. The amendment institutionalized discrimination against Arabs compared to any other non-Jewish citizen. Since it was passed, Israeli citizens could marry any non-Jew in the world and live with them in Israel, but if they married Arabs “from the region,” they could not live as a family in Israel.

[…]

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff

December 10, 2004

www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/12/10/

soldier_admits_his_story_of_iraqi_boys_death_a_lie?mode=PF

When Army Sergeant Dennis Edwards spoke at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School last month, 100 students listened in rapt silence as he told chilling tales of battlefield horror in Iraq and criticized President Bush’s motives for going to war.

Edwards, 23, a Barnstable High School graduate, said he and two other soldiers shot and killed a 10-year-old boy in Iraq who pretended to be wounded and suddenly fired an AK-47 rifle. The boy was found to have explosives attached to his body, Edwards told the stunned audience.

Now, Edwards has admitted to his superiors in the elite 82d Airborne Division that the story about the shooting was a lie, Army officials yesterday. As a result, the veteran of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could be charged with making false statements, face a court-martial, and be stripped of his rank.

His confession has also saddened Dennis-Yarmouth teachers and students, who said they felt honored and captivated by his appearance.

“We need to use this as a teachable moment,” Superintendent Tony Pierantozzi said yesterday. “We need to make sure our students … clearly understand that sometimes individuals might elaborate stories or examples for their own benefit.”

[…]

“All I know is my son’s never lied before,” she [Edna Marceline of West Yarmouth] said. “So I don’t know why he would start lying now.”

[…]

‘The Pianist’ of Palestine

By OMAR BARGHOUTI

November 29, 2004

counterpunch.org/barghouti11292004.html

When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions […] I was horrified by the film’s depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: “that’s one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians.” I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel’s leading newspaper Ha’aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that “insensitivity,” with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to “contend with a complex and dangerous reality” was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940s.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual “punishment” meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: “The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature — though not its extent — to the Warsaw ghetto.”

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel’s justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army’s wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: “[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague.”

Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of “disciplining” the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain “security.”

According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army’s education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian “flanked by his wife and children,” punching him in the face, and “even kicked [him] in the lower part of his body,” the report said.

A recent exhibit titled “Breaking the Silence,” organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towrds defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers’ graffiti that included: “Arabs to the gas chambers“; “Arabs = an inferior race“; “Spill Arab blood“; and, of course, the ever so popular “Death to the Arabs,” soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: “Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs.” The exhibit’s main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.

[…]

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. His article “9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms” was chosen among the “Best of 2002” by the Guardian. He can be reached at: [email protected]

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Monday November 29, 2004

The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1361755,00.html

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to “play something sad” while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. “What about Majdanek?” he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

[…]

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

September 15, 2004, 5:52 a.m.

By Anne Morse

www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200409150552.asp

Critics are calling the media scandal over the Jerry Killian forgeries “Rathergate.” But to thousands of Vietnam veterans, the real Rathergate took place 16 years ago when Dan Rather successfully foisted a fraud onto the American people. […]

On June 2, 1988, CBS aired an hour-long special titled CBS Reports: The Wall Within, which CBS trumpeted as the “rebirth of the TV documentary.” It purported to tell the true story of Vietnam through the eyes of six of the men who fought there. And what terrible stories they had to tell.

“I think I was one of the highest trained, underpaid, eighteen-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for,” said Steve Southards, a Navy SEAL who told Rather he had escaped society to live in the forests of Washington state. Under Rather’s gentle coaxing, Southards described slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, making his work appear to be that of the North Vietnamese.

[…]

Rather then moved on to suicidal veteran named George Grule, who was stationed on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga off the coast of Vietnam during a secret mission. Grule described the horror of watching a friend walk into the spinning propeller of a plane, which chopped him to pieces and sprayed Grule with his blood. The memory of this trauma left Grule, like Steve, unable to function in normal society.

Neither could Mikal Rice, who broke down as he described a grenade attack at Cam Ranh Bay, which blew in half the body of a buddy, “Sergeant Call.” “He died in my arms,” Rice tearfully recalled. Rice described how the sound of thunder and cars backfiring would regularly trigger his terrible memories.

Most horrific of all were the memories of Terry Bradley, a “fighting sergeant” who told Rather he had skinned alive 50 Vietnamese men, women, and children in one hour and stacked their bodies in piles. “Could you do this for one hour of your life, you stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into a body, an arm, a tit, an eyeball … Imagine us over there for a year and doing it intensely,” Bradley said. “That is sick.”

[…]

The The Wall Within was hailed by critics who — like the Washington Post’s Tom Shales — gushed that the documentary was “extraordinarily powerful.” There was just one problem: Almost none of it was true.

The truth was uncovered by B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and author of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (with Glenna Whitley). Burkett discovered that only one of the vets had actually served in combat. Steve Southards, who’d claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL assassin, had actually served as an equipment repairman stationed far from combat. […]

And George Gruel, who claimed he was traumatized by the sight of his friend being chopped to pieces by a propeller? Navy records reveal that a propeller accident did take place on the Ticonderoga when Gruel was aboard — but that he wasn’t around when it happened. […] Nevertheless, Burkett notes, Gruel receives $1,952 a month from the Veterans Administration for “psychological trauma” related to an event he only heard about.

Mikal Rice […] actually spent his tour as a guard with an MP company at Cam Ranh Bay. He never saw combat. Neither did Terry Bradley, who was not the “fighting sergeant” he’d claimed to be. […]

[…]

[…] Says Burkett: The Wall Within “precisely fit what Americans have grown to believe about the Vietnam War and its veterans: They routinely committed war crimes. They came home from an immoral war traumatized, vilified, then pitied. Jobless, homeless, addicted, suicidal, they remain afflicted by inner conflicts, stranded on the fringes of society.”

Burkett, who did check the records of the vets Rather interviewed, shared his discoveries with CBS. So did Thomas Turnage, then administrator of the Veterans Administration, who was appalled by Rather’s use of bogus statistics on the rates of suicide, homelessness, and mental illness among Vietnam veterans — statistics that can also be easily checked. […]

[…]

— Anne Morse is a writer living in Maryland.

Stanislaw Ryniak, Auschwitz Inmate, Dies at 88

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 28, 2004

www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/europe/28RYNI.html?
ex=1098763200&en=65cf6fa18167905f&ei=5070

WARSAW, Feb. 25 — Stanislaw Ryniak, the first person imprisoned at Auschwitz, the World War II Nazi concentration camp, has died. He was 88.

[…]

Mr. Ryniak was arrested by the Nazis in his hometown, Sanok, in southern Poland, in May 1940 and was accused of being a member of the Polish resistance. He was 24.

He arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, together with hundreds of other Polish political prisoners on that first train load of inmates.

Numbers were tattooed on prisoners’ arms in the order of their arrival. The first 30 numbers were given to German criminal prisoners who would serve as camp guards. Mr. Ryniak’s number was 31.

In 1944 he was sent to the Leitmeritz work camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, where he was subjected to hard labor until the end of the war. On his release, he weighed 88 pounds.

[…]

The Nazis, who started World War II by invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, built the Auschwitz camp in the southern city of Oswiecim in 1940 for Polish prisoners. (Auschwitz is the German rendering of Oswiecim.) They soon expanded it to include the Birkenau complex and began confining hundreds of thousands of European Jews. […]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company