"It's something Goebbels would have written," Guy Ophir tells The Jerusalem Post of organ harvesting story.
By E.B. SOLOMONT JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN NYAftonbladet sweden organ trafficking 248(photo credit: Screenshot)
Israeli lawyer Guy Ophir has filed a lawsuit against the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet over an article it published in which IDF soldiers were accused of harvesting organs from Palestinians.
The $7.5 million suit, which names the paper and writer Donald Bostrom, was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday, according to Ophir, who said the article's allegations were anti-Semitic and amounted to "racist blood libel" against Jews and Israeli soldiers.
"It's something Goebbels would have written," Ophir told The Jerusalem Post. He said he filed the suit in New York because the newspaper had representatives there; the paper is also distributed in New York, and the article made reference to a Jew from New Jersey arrested earlier this month on organ trafficking charges. "The lawsuit, it comes from anger," Ophir said, adding that he would donate any money from damages to charity, including the IDF.
Calling the article "very dangerous," Ophir said the article was "totally libelous." As a retired IDF soldier who served in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Ophir said the article's claims were medically impossible. "Those things that are stated in the article never happened," he said.
On Monday, the editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet denied accusations that he was anti-Semitic. "I'm not a Nazi," Jan Helin wrote in a blog post. "I'm an editor-in-chief who has allowed the publication of a culture article because it asked a number of relevant questions."
