¡No Pasarán!: The New Blood Libel

The New Blood Libel

posted by Joe @ 15:47

As if rendering aid were not enough, the common, base anti-Americanism one is used to coming from Le Monde is rising to exceed pre-Hopey-Changey levels. A piece in today’s Al Jazeera sur Seine alleges that a massive wave of butchery-like amputation is taking place in Haiti wherever Americans doctors have engaged in triage.

This blood libel comes from 3 French Doctors who make passing comments about how “they wouldn’t have to amputate in Paris”. In spite of the fact that they aren’t practicing emergency medicine in Paris, or Houston, or Atlanta, the Le Monde readership laps it up and comments rather orgasmically over the possibility of impugning Americans in any context possible:

Monstrous USA! Everything revolves around the war home now, their policies, neo-colonialism (Iraq / AfPak = 1.5 million dead), their invasions humanitarians, their budget (on credit from other countries) that goes to 60% in war industries and death, their imagination, their films! The France was right to challenge the invasion which is seen and sees the devastation! It must be able to say the U.S. is a threat to humanity (see also Copenhagen) as was the former USSR!

Yes indeed, those films caused this!

Terrifying. Between how Americans "judge" this population, and the 20,000 soldiers landed to occupy Haiti, colonialism looms on the horizon, not so different in form and in his "speech" that might have existed in the 19th century ...

Neo-colonialism? By whom, exactly? By Barack Obama? If that’s really the case, wouldn’t we be bringing in farmers by the boatload to ‘colonize’ their land? Apparently reality and logic aren’t much of an issue to these dramatic fantasists, even tangentially playing off another commenter calling what has taken place in Haiti “like a guillotine” and comparing American aid workers to pillaging rebel forces in Sierra Leone:

"Guillotine amputations” was a technique pioneered on a large-scale children's RUF rebels in Sierra Leone in the 90s. 20 000 civilians had been victimized ...

And so forth, as per the usual pedantic yadda, yadda, yadda we’ve grown to expect that a big chunk of the readership is incapable of any other sort of statement.

Overshadowing this kind of reporting that amounts to out-of-scale agitprop, is what those with a specialty in prosthesis are gauging what their planning efforts will require of them:

Estimates of new Haitian amputees reported in the international media the first weeks after the earthquake overstated the number by tens of thousands, Winfried Danke, executive director of Prosthetics Outreach Foundation, told Associated Content Thursday. Danke said the original estimates given news media by doctors working at the disaster scene, ranging from tens of thousands to 150,000, has been pared down to "several thousand," as reports are updated and analyzed. The number may be as low as 2,000.

While there will be less amputations stemming from the earthquake than originally predicted, meeting the need for prosthetics and rehabilitative services will be difficult. Haiti's prosthetics production capacity was almost wiped out by the earthquake.

No doubt were Le Monde’s readers to have heard of that, they would connect their own sad little imaginary dots, and assume that like ‘a war for oil’, the earthquake was somehow magically engineered by that evil Obama White House to create a dependant market for prosthetics.

Knowing that he was not operating in London, Doctors of the World’s Jacques Lorblanche indicated:

"We expect to perform around 400 amputations over the coming days"

Don’t worry, I’m sure that out there in the zeitgeist there’s another “organ harvesting” story in the works.

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Monday, February 01, 2010

The New Blood Libel