Even the wild imagination of the world's most vile anti-Semites couldn't have dreamed up a more perfect scenario: Jews stealing the organs of non-Jews all over the world, as part of a shadowy network with "tentacles everywhere" and a motivation of "revenge, restitution, reparation for the Holocaust." Yet, like in so many cases when something is 'too good to be true,' this story required such a twisting of logic and good taste that it reads like a long lost chapter of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

So when the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs ran the latest rant of conspiracy theorist Alison Weir, it invited the firestorm of criticism that comes from tying weak investigative reporting to blatantly racist rubbish.

Weir's very impetus for writing this story, "Israeli Organ Harvesting: From Moldova to Palestine," derives from a baseless Swedish tabloid piece. The author of that Swedish piece, Donald Bostrom, admitted in a Russian television interview, "It's not up to me to have any evidence. I'm not convinced even that it happened." Likewise, the family members of the supposed Palestinian victim in the story have gone on record stating, "I don't know if this is true," and "We don't have any evidence to support this."

If that's not enough, Weir also has a bad habit of quoting other conspiracy theorists and misusing their academic titles to enhance credibility. Take the following quote from Weir's article as an example:

"Dr. A. Clare Brandabur, an American professor, writes that information in the Swedish article resonated with reports she heard during the first intifada."

Weir fails to mention that her expert witness is a professor of English literature with no academic experience in the field other than her own personal bias of having taught in the Middle East and her penchant for crackpot conspiracies. On top of that, Brandabur also believes that the U.S. government carried out the September 11 attacks:

"So American fear and anger was directed toward 'Islamo-fascism' and 'Palestinian terrorists,' while behind the scenes, under the guise of revenge for a despicable attack—one that like Pearl Harbor would in Roosevelt's words 'live in infamy'-- the real perpetrators of 9/11 were officials in our own government, who had carefully staged a home-grown terrorist attack designed to justify force to acquire US control of all remaining energy reserves worldwide."

Aside from some of the questionable evidence that Weir presents, her intentions are laid bare by her discussion of Israeli "motivations" for organ harvesting. Weir cites as evidence a 2008 speech by Nancy Scheper-Hughes that explained Israeli's motivations as greed, as well as a desire for "revenge, restitution, reparation for the Holocaust," and an attitude of "a kind of 'eye for an eye' and a tooth for a tooth.' We're going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us."

Thus, Israel and as Scheper-Hughes says, its "tentacles reaching out worldwide" are stealing Palestinian organs for dying Israeli medical patients as a grand revenge for the Holocaust. Even the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous granddaddy of Jewish conspiracies, did not attribute such base and disgusting accusations against the Jews.

There can be no doubt that Weir's accusations are directed at the Jewish people and Judaism as a religion. As a defense for her accusations that at least some rabbis sanction the stealing of Jewish organs, Weir quotes an "unnamed Israeli scholar on Jewish scriptural views and ethnic chauvinism," who states, "The sad thing, is, these statements are in our books. He points out that while such Talmudic texts were 'purely theoretical' at the time they were written, now they're being cited 'in circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered."

All of this raises the question of what motivates Weir's publishers at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and the web site Counterpunch, which also published her organ theft conspiracy piece. A magazine dedicated to "telling the truth," and "interpreting the Middle East for North Americans, and Interpreting North America for the Middle East," should pay closer attention to the message and the truth that it is sending out.