GZ Mosque Design Has Visitors Walking on Stars of David

The developers of the Ground Zero Mosque have released three architects images of the planned building. The design seems to be using the Star of David, a widely recognized symbol to represent the Jewish people and central element in the Israeli flag, as a design element. Notice how people will be walking on the Star of David. Click on the third image to get a close up.

I think this is a sign of disrespect. Would Muslims be comfortable walking on symbols of their own religion?

Israel: Forensic institute did harvest body parts from Palestinians in 1990's

Well, they harvested body parts without the families' permission from both Israelis and Palestinians. Actual numbers of bodies from different ethnic groups used is not provided in the AP article, so we can't really know how much this was an abuse of Palestinians or a crime of opportunity .

How disappointing:

1) to find out there was truth to the accusations,

2) that Israel did not put this man in jail, and,

3) that this is coming out now because an anthropology professor at UC Berkeley,Nancy Scheper-Hughes, decided to release the interview she conducted in 2000 with the man who was head of the forensics lab at the time, not Israel government motivated.

The AP story:

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

Hiss became director of the institute in 1988. He said in the interview that the practice of harvesting organs without permission began in the "early 1990s." However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims. Hiss said he believed that was done with family consent. The harvesting ended in 2000, he said.

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

Gaza Market Bombing Mystery

I am wondering if the market bombing reported in the Times on Line and the New York Times is the market bombing hoax I read about at Little Green Footballs. The video posted at LiveLeak was actually of a 2005 accidental explosion of a truck full of Hamas rockets at a Palestinian rally but was headlined "GRAPHIC Video of Israel Defense Force’s attack on Gaza civilian market" until a commenter presented convincing evidence of the hoax.

So could the reports that Israel has bombed a market in Gaza today be based on this fraud? The TimesOnLine has it:

In Gaza City an Israeli tank shell killed a family of five Palestinians, including a 14-year-old girl, when it hit their car. In a separate attack, an Israeli shell hit the main vegetable market in the city. A Times reporter at Shifa hospital saw six ambulances and seven cars – there is a shortage of emergency vehicles – ferry in the wounded. Two were badly maimed children. Medics said five people were killed in the market bombing, and 40 wounded. Israel said it had no knowledge of a market being hit.

I bolded that last sentence about Israel having no knowledge of the incident because it jumped out at me. Israel seems to have extensive knowledge and great documentation, so why not of this particular incident, I wondered.
The New York Times just gives a brief report:

In Gaza City, at least five civilians were killed and many more wounded after Israeli rockets or shells landed in the market.

The sources listed at the bottom of the page are:

Sources: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; The Palestinian Information Center; Israel Defense Forces

I just wanted to document this. Maybe there is both a hoax market bombing and a real market bombing. Or maybe there was a real market bombing but Hamas didn't have good video, so they manufactured this fake one from their 2005 accident. Not sure. Time will tell, I suppose.