Monday, July 27, 2009

The Ringworm Children


I just read about the film "The Ringworm Children", released in 2004. Directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, it won the prize for "best documentary" at the Haifa International film festival:
In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and returned with seven x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army.

They were to be used in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths to be used as guinea pigs. Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head. For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year. The entire Health budget was 60 million liras. The money paid by the Americans is equivalent to billions of dollars today.

To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on "school trips" and their parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed thousands over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic headaches and psychosis.
Apparently the motivation was eugenics, which is the theory that people can improve the quality of future genes by weeding out unhealthy and undesirable traits. Only Sephardi children received the x-rays: "I was in class and the men came to take us on a tour. They asked our names. The Ashkenazi children were told to return to their seats. The dark children were put on the bus."

Sephardi Jews originate in the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) and also North Africa. They are contrasted with Ashkenazi Jews (literally, German Jews) who are Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland in the west of Germany.

Giora Yoseftal (1912 – 1962) and one time Development Minister, Minister of Labour and Minister of Housing and Construction, called the Moroccan Jews "primitives" and "backward". Levi Eshkol (1895-1969) who served as the third Prime Minister of Israel called them "human rubbish" and "defective people". Nachum Goldman (1895–1982), a Polish-born Zionist and founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress, described North African Jewry "a catastrophic immigration". Dr Chaim Sheba, then director of the health ministry, believed in the genetic supremacy of the Ashkenazi Jews.

Jewssansfrontieres asks if Dr Sheba is Israel's Dr Mengele. Joseph Mengele was a doctor at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau who was hated for his cruelty. In one instance, he drew a line on the wall of the children's block between 150 and 156 centimeters (about 5 feet or 5 feet 2 inches) from the floor, and sent those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber. (I have to pipe up here since I fall into that category of shorties: Being short has its advantages, otherwise it would have been naturally weeded out by now. What advantages? Having a lower centre of gravity means shorter people can change direction faster. Just look at Maradona, best footballer ever, who is only 5'5". And I'm thinking of all the pint-sized East European champion gymnasts...)

In the film, a Moroccan lady is shown saying: "It was a Holocaust, a Sephardi Holocaust. And what I want to know is why no one stood up to stop it."

The passage I quoted is from a review of the film and you can read it in full here on infowars.

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