I'd advise everyone not to jump into this heated issue simply because it is so hard to establish fact from fiction. However, regardless of the veracity of the claims, the way the Israeli media and state have reacted in unison is worth commenting upon.

The story is based upon claims that Palestinian corpses killed by the IDF are regularly returned missing organs which are used for Israeli transplants. This may be propaganda, perhaps based upon the fact that New Jersey Rabbis were recently arrested for organ harvesting, perhaps based upon the fact that every state regularly returns corpses to families missing organs after post-mortems. The obvious Israeli disdain for Palestinian lives shown in Gaza this year does lend strength if not plausibility to the claims though, especially since the same practice has been shown in Chinese criminal executions, and the Swedish newspaper did no more than ask for an Israeli investigation.

The Israeli reaction has been to call for a boycott of Swedish goods such as Ikea. For good measure they have also called for a boycott of Norway, presumably since Norwegian doctors were witnesses to the recent Gazan holocaust. This reaction is what is worth commenting upon, since a recent European Court of Human Rights ruling was that boycotts of Israel by Europeans are illegal. The same rules should apply. Why should Israel be allowed to boycott peaceful European countries over a newpaper article without our citizens being allowed to boycott them over a genuine mass-slaughter?