Hamas-CAIR Official Repeats One of the Absurdest of All Antisemitic Charges

Crazier and crazier. Well, if the Israelis commit genocide, or “genocide,” why wouldn’t they harvest the organs of Palestinians and, it now is claimed, collect the skin — a full-body scalping —  as well of dead Palestinians? More on this absurd charge, that ought to have provoked whistles and catcalls and boos at the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where it was made, can be found here.

A senior Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) official claimed Israel harvests and collects the skin of deceased Palestinians at a recent Ohio state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Israel has the largest human skin bank in the world,” Khalid Turaani, executive director of CAIR’s chapter in Ohio, said last week at a hearing on adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

“Where do you think they got all this skin from? They have more human skin than China and India. They are literally skinning the dead bodies of my brothers and sisters in Palestine,” Turaani continued. “And if I call them Nazis, your law [adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism] is going to punish me.”

Scholars and activist groups have described the conspiracy theory of Israeli organ harvesting as a modern version of the antisemitic blood libel rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood during the holiday of Passover. The organ harvesting claim dates back to 2009, when a Swedish tabloid published an erroneous article saying that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) kills Palestinians to provide organs to Israeli hospitals….

Last week’s hearing came about four months after Turaani took part in an online event in October alongside a senior member of Hamas who has been sanctioned by the US government and other individuals tied to the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organizations….

Ah, Mr. Turaani, we couldn’t help but notice the company you keep. Do you know that Majed al-Zeer, with whom you happily participated in an online event, is a senior member of Hamas, and that Hamas has been declared a “designated terrorist group” by the U.S. government? Did you know that Al-Zeer has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for being a senior member of Hamas in Europe, charged with fundraising for the terror group? Yes, of course you did, and you are proud of knowing such a man as Majed al-Zeer.

In November 2023, CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said “yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,” referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities.

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“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” he said.

On October 7, 2023, Gaza was not under any siege. Israel had completely pulled out from Gaza in 2005. And on October 6, 2023, 19,000 Gazans went to their jobs in Israel, where they were earning two to three times more than what they could earn in Gaza. There were plans by the Israeli government to increase their number, in order to help the economy of the Strip. On October 6, Israel was supplying Gaza with both electricity and water. All those plans changed, of course, on October 7.

About a week later [in November 2023, after Nihad Awad of CAIR hailed the Hamas attack], the executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, said that Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence. He added in his sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City that for the Palestinians, “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.

Really? Have the Arabs inside Israel been gang-raped, tortured, mutilated and murdered the way Israelis were on October 7 by Hamas? In 1949, at the war’s end between Israel and the Arab states that had attacked it, there were 160,000 Arabs in Israel. Today there are two million. That doesn’t sound like they’ve been suffering, now does it?

But let’s go back to the looney charge by Turaani that Israel has the largest store of human skin in the world — skin cut off the bodies of Palestinian corpses. How is it that until now, after nearly four score years of warfare between Israel and the Palestinians, it is only now that such a charge is made? And as there has not been a single mention by the Palestinians themselves of such a ghoulish practice until Turaani came along, shouldn’t we be at least… skeptical? Where is the ocular proof? Not even a single photograph of that largest-in-the-world collection of human skin exists.

Since Turaani is now accusing Israel of skinning Palestinian corpses, without the slightest evidence, why don’t we mention what we do have evidence for: the torturing, and the mutilating, of Israelis both living and dead. On October 7, 2023 members of Hamas sliced the breasts off women, stabbed girls in their vaginas after having subjected them to mass rapes, tied families together with barbed wire before burning them to death, cut off the genitalia of men, and gouged out the eyes of both men and women before killing them. That’s what I’d call “organ harvesting Palestinian style.”