NY organ trafficker admits buying kidneys in Israel for $10,000... and selling them in U.S. for $120,000

28 October 2011  old news but do you think they've really changed

Lawyers for a man who pleaded guilty Thursday in the first ever federal conviction for illegal organ trafficking say he was performing life-saving services for severely ill people.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from New York, admitted in a Trenton federal court to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for desperate New Jersey-based customers in exchange for payments of $120,000 or more.

He also pleaded guilty to a conspiracy count for brokering an illegal kidney sale.

Attorneys Ronald Kleinberg and Richard Finkel say Rosenbaum never solicited clients.

He simply agreed to help desperately ill people by finding them kidney donors, they said.

The lawyers claim the surgeries occurred in prestigious American hospitals and were performed by experienced transplant experts.

They did not, however, name the hospitals involved, the Associated Press reports.

The lawyers claimed that the donors he arranged to give up kidneys were fully aware of what they were doing.

But anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who described Israel as a 'pariah' in the organ transplant world, has said in the past that many of the donors were desperately poor immigrants from eastern European countries such as Moldova, Romania and Russia.

They say the recipients are leading healthy lives thanks to Rosenbaum.

The 60-year-old was arrested two years ago following a huge investigation into corruption in New Jersey.

The probe led to 46 arrests, including several rabbis, the New York Daily News reports.

He was nabbed after an FBI informant who was pretending to be a businessman told him he was looking for a new kidney for a sick uncle

Rosenbaum was caught on tape boasting that he had brokered 'quite a lot' of illegal transplants.

He told the informant: 'I am what you call a matchmaker.'

'I bring a guy what I believe, he's suitable for your uncle ... I've never had a failure.'

Prosecutors said he bought the organs from vulnerable people in Israel for as little as $10,000, then sold them here for a minimum of $120,000.

New Jersey's U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said: 'A black market in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.'

Rosenbaum faces a maximum five-year prison sentence on each count, plus a fine of up to $250,000. He also agreed to forfeit $420,000 in property that came from the kidney sales.

He is a member of the Orthodox Jewish community in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, where he had told neighbors he was in the construction business.

Under 1984 federal law, it is illegal for anyone to knowingly buy or sell organs for transplant.

The practice is illegal just about everywhere else in the world, too.
But demand for kidneys far outstrips the supply, with 4,540 people dying in the U.S. last year while waiting for a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

As a result, there is a thriving black market for kidneys around the world.

Art Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-chairman of a United Nations task force on organ trafficking, said kidneys are the most common of all trafficked organs because they can be harvested from live donors, unlike other organs.

He said Rosenbaum had pleaded guilty to one of the 'most heinous crimes against another human being.'

Mr Caplan said: 'Internationally, about one quarter of all kidneys appear to be trafficked.

'But until this case, it had not been a crime recognized as reaching the United States.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2054382/Organ-trafficker-admits-buying-I...

November 19, 2015

Israel preventing Gaza woman from attending her own wedding

According to the Israeli army, Palestinians from Gaza can attend a relative’s wedding — just not their own.

The Israeli army is denying a 23-year-old Palestinian woman from traveling through Israel to reach her own wedding ceremony in Jordan.

According to Israeli human rights group Gisha, the petitioner has been engaged to her fiancé — a Palestinian from Gaza with Spanish citizenship — for the past year and a half. Their wedding date has been delayed twice already due to fact that Israel will not let her leave the Gaza Strip, the second time after the couple had already sent out the invitations.

The woman, as well as her future in-laws, have attempted to coordinate leaving from Gaza through Rafah Crossing to Egypt, but the crossing has been mostly closed for the past year and a half and the line for a visa to pass through is some 17,000-people-long, according to Gisha.

The Israeli army rejected the woman’s previous exit permit applications on the grounds that she “does not meet the criteria.” According to the government’s own criteria, Palestinians may request exit permits only in exceptional humanitarian cases, including to attend the wedding or funeral of a first-degree relative — but not their own.

Gisha filed a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice Thursday on behalf of the woman and her future in-laws. The petition demands that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, the army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), and the army’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison office justify the travel ban.

http://972mag.com/israel-preventing-gaza-woman-from-attending-her-own-wedding/11...

jmjcare wrote on Dec 1^st, 2015 at 12:10pm:

Totally different to the Palestinians who actively encourage their citizens to murder Israeli's

. Have the government of Palestine ever in history ever charged any Palestinian for crimes against a Israeli.

Israeli Army Sets House Ablaze West of Qalqilya

QALQILYA, December 1, 2015 (WAFA) – Israeli army forces intentionally fired gas canisters in the direction of a Palestinian family's house, setting it on fire.

Witnesses told WAFA Israeli army forces raided al-Naqar neighborhood, west of Qalqilya, and fired sound and toxic gas bombs, setting the house of an unidentified Palestinian family ablaze.

No injuries were reported following the incident.

Since early October 2015, ongoing clashes and tension have been running high between Palestinians and Israeli army and police in the West Bank including Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Israel, fueled by Israel’s continuous attempts to enforce a unilateral division of al-Aqsa Mosque compound between Muslims and Jews.   

http://www.wafa.ps/english/index.php?action=detail&id=30032

JERUSALEM IN THE QUR’AN

http://www.imranhosein.org/media/books/j_in_q.pdf

Quote:

Netanyahu's craziness is calculated, to drive out Palestinians

November 5, 2015

Although Uri Avnery has been a long-standing critic of Israel and has been one of the first to promote dialogue with the Palestinians, he is still a Zionist. Because of that I have a lot of reservations about the things he writes. His piece from the 30th of October, ‘Is the Israeli Prime Minister Insane? Adolf, Amin and Bibi’ is a good example of why I feel this way. It is a perfect illustration of how someone who can be such a clear thinker in some ways, is also so blinkered by his innate and almost unconscious support of Zionism. This tendency to be so blinkered and so unconsciously so, serves to support the smokescreen that surrounds Zionism and its real purpose. , namely a conversation about settler-colonialism and its effects on the colonised.

Of course Netanyahu has a personality disorder (as a psychotherapist I can see all the signs of it), but insane in the way that Avnery means, he is not! Netanyahu’s policies have been 100% consistent with Israel’s goal of taking all the land without the people. To complete the Zionist project of creating an exclusively Jewish safe haven for all Jews in the land of Palestine, Jews will need to be an absolute majority in Israel-Palestine. A few Palestinians can probably be allowed to remain but with all the spirit of resistance knocked out of them, so they are no longer a ‘problem’ for Israel. Israel has good role models of ’successful’ settler-colonial projects in the US and Australia, countries that are also staunch and fanatic supporters of Israel. Netanyahu can see that it worked there. They got away with it, so why not in Israel?

Everything Netanyahu has ever done has been designed to advance Israel towards this ultimate goal. Notice that Netanyahu’s statement about how the Mufti of Jerusalem gave Hitler the idea for the extermination of the Jews came a short time after relaxing the gun laws in Israel. I do not think that these two facts are unconnected. Frankly I am amazed by how effective the smokescreen is. So effective, that no one sees what he is doing, and in the meantime the project is reaching a slow and horrific crescendo right under everyone’s noses, and with full complicity of the world’s community.

Netanyahu has been watching Israeli state policies fail at driving out the majority of the Palestinians. So he is now busying himself recruiting an informal army in Israel to assist the official military, law-enforcement and security forces, an army made out of lynching mobs. He gives ordinary people the firearms and then the ideology that says that the Palestinians are responsible for the extermination of the Jews. Now, his logic goes, it is justified to do the same to them. Even non-psychopaths can be recruited to kill under this kind of ideology simply because the Holocaust is such a sensitive issue in Israel, and since every Jewish citizen is thoroughly, profoundly and emotively indoctrinated on Holocaust history.

People have been emphasizing the criticism from within Israel of Netanyahu’s comment, but the right kind of people on the streets of Israel and the colonies in the Occupied West Bank will believe what he said. This is all they need in order to go completely wild. It’s when governments condone extremism and mob mentality, and when they provide fuel to already escalating extremist fire, that we really need to start worrying.

It’s been happening in the colonies anyway, where colonists have for a very long time been getting away with doing whatever they wish to the Palestinians, under military protection and immunity from prosecution. Now Netanyahu is attempting to widen the extremism we see in the colonies into Israeli cities, right into the heart of Tel Aviv. This is his attempt to unite a country that has been a bit split between the cities, where ‘ordinary’ Israelis are often seen as ‘latte-sipping, apathetic, non-patriotic Lefties’ who are critical of the colonies, and those in the colonies in the Occupied West Bank. Netanyahu knows that if Israel is to complete its project, all Israelis have to be on board, or at least that the chasm between the colonies and the cities has to be somehow closed.

Netanyahu is in the process of mobilising and radicalising the entire society in Israel to escalate the murder of the Palestinians in order to push the Palestinians to leave once and for all. You don’t need everyone to go berserk, only enough to instil such fear that will lead to masses of people fleeing. Where they will go, Israel does not care. They didn’t care in 1948 or 1967, and they don’t care now. They just want them out. We are witnessing a repetition of the policies of 1948 and 1967 where Palestinians were driven out by every means possible calculated to spread panic.

Israelis killed Palestinian with 'illegal ammunition'

Wed Dec 9, 2015

Medical sources say a 19-year-old Palestinian shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank was killed with a type of bullet which is considered illegal under international law.

Medical sources with Beit Jala Hospital said on Tuesday that Malik Akram Shahin was shot in the head with an explosive bullet, which caused his skull to shatter into “hundreds of pieces.”

Medics say Israeli forces clearly aimed to kill the Palestinian youth, as he was shot directly in the head with “dum dum” bullets, which expand upon impact.

Ma’an News Agency quoted a local as saying that Shahin was "left bleeding for a long time before he was evacuated to the public hospital in Beit Jala, where medics pronounced him dead."

He was killed when Israeli forces stormed the Dheisheh refugee camp, located south of the city of Bethlehem.

The use of such bullets is considered a war crime under the 1899 Hague Declaration and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The bullets are known to cause severe damage to their victims, as they are designed to splinter apart and become lodged deep in the body.

This comes as Tel Aviv has repeatedly denied claims by Palestinian medical examiners that its forces use such bullets.

Israeli forces have been killing Palestinians on an almost daily basis since October when tensions intensified between the two sides.

Palestinians have been witnessing increasing violence by Israeli forces and settlers, who frequently storm the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam. The Palestinians say the Tel Aviv regime seeks to change the status quo of the compound.

Some 120 Palestinians and about 20 Israelis have been killed in the recent wave of clashes between Palestinians and Israelis since the start of October.

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/12/09/440941/Palestine-Israel-Bethlehem-Beit-J...