Report: Israel threatens Swedish snub for media claims against army

Aug 21, 2009, 10:09 GMT

Tel Aviv/Stockholm - Israel upped the ante in an ongoing feud with Sweden over Swedish media reports unfavourable to the Israeli army, threatening to put off a planned visit from Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, Israeli media reported Friday.

The fighting stems from an August 17 report in Swedish daily Aftonbladet accusing Israel soldiers of killing Palestinians and plundering their organs.

Unless Sweden distances itself from the report, the Israeli government will delay the planned visit by Bildt, scheduled for the end of August, reported Israeli newspapers.

Additionally, Israel's ultra-conservative Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared Sweden's lack of comment on the report to its failure to condemn the Holocaust during the Nazi regime.

He was expected to share his thoughts with Bildt in a telephone call planned for Friday.

The Swedish ambassador to Israel distanced herself from the report on Wednesday, but her statement has in turn been criticized by the Swedish Union of journalists as an attack on freedom of speech. The statement is no longer visible on the embassy website.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on his blog Thursday night: 'It is not difficult to understand that the writer's accusations created strong reactions in Israel.

'There have been calls from some sectors in Israel that we should one way or the other publicly refute the article or even intervene to prevent it from being published. But that is not how things work in our country - and neither should they.'

Freelance writer Donald Bostrom, the author of the piece, defended the story on Swedish breakfast radio Friday.

'I was there, I think any journalist would write what I did if they had experienced what I did on the West Bank.'

On Thursday, Bostrom filed a police complaint that he had received threats, he told the Swedish Journalist Union's online site.

   Bostrom's article was headlined 'Our sons are plundered of their organs.' The report claimed that the bodies of Palestinians seized in the West Bank were returned to their families with missing organs.

   He said that in 1992 he spoke, on behalf of a television company, to 'a large number of Palestinian families on the West Bank and Gaza who thought that their sons had been plundered of organs before they were killed.

   'Our sons were used as involuntary organ donors,' Bostrom quoted Palestinians as saying.