JERUSALEM—Several members of the Israeli Parliament were caught in diplomatic crosshairs earlier this week when the Chinese Embassy demanded they retract their signatures from a petition.
The petition dealt with the crime of illegal organ harvesting in China and was bound for U.N. headquarters in Geneva. Nine members of Parliament signed the petition, but were summarily contacted by the Parliament’s political adviser, Oded Ben-Hur, who advised that signatures be retracted and an apology letter be signed.
According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ben-Hur was acting at the behest of the Chinese Embassy. Three signatories were pushed into withdrawing their signatures and support for the petition.
One of the petition’s staunchest supporters, Member of Parliament (MP) Uri Orbach, said he signed it because he “agreed with its contents.”
“It looks to me just and fair,” said Orbach in an interview by phone with The Epoch Times. “I am familiar with the topic—I read about it.”
Orbach said he was asked to cancel his signature and that he also saw an apology letter intended for the Chinese Embassy, but he refused to sign it.
“I am not signing something that I don’t believe in,” he said of the apology letter, adding that he didn’t understand why the Chinese Embassy would even ask for an apology.
“To apologize for what?” said Orbach. “Only because somebody is strong?”
Organ Harvesting
The Epoch Times broke the story in March 2006 of the forced, live organ harvesting in China from practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong. According to The Epoch Times sources, practitioners were being tissue-typed, blood-typed, and held in detention as a giant, live organ bank. When a patient in a Chinese hospital needed an organ, the retail organs would be taken from the practitioner, killing him or her.
Soon after the first Epoch Times reports appeared, the Canadians David Kilgour, a former Canadian secretary of state (Asia-Pacific) and crown prosecutor, and David Matas, an international human rights lawyer and Nazi hunter, launched an independent investigation of the allegations.
In a report published in July 2006, Kilgour and Matas concluded that the allegations were true. They estimated that in the years 2000–2005, 41,500 organ transplantations took place for which the most likely source for the organs was detained Falun Gong practitioners. Their groundbreaking work has since been corroborated by other investigators.
While the rate of organ transplantation in China has declined significantly from its peak in 2005, the transplantation industry in China still does 10,000 transplants a year. Matas estimates that the organs for 8,000 of those transplants come from Falun Gong practitioners.
