In other words...

Remember the Swedish article which I recently translated, despite a complete ignorance of Swedish? Well, someone working independently of me did another translation of the same piece. Mine's just as accurate, or nearly so, and it reads better. Neener.

My ex (the first of many exes) was a professional translator -- German to English -- and when she was under severe deadline pressure, we would collaborate. She would hand me an ultra-rough translation and tell me to polish the text into something that read as though it had been written in English originally. Where the German text had "Schweinehund," she would write "pig-dog," which I would transform into "you bastard" or "jackass" or "son of a bitch" or "Pat Buchanan" or whatever else seemed right.

One of these days I may tell you about the early script by Roland Emmerich which she and I translated. Yes, it was actually filmed. You haven't seen it. Although the movie does not quite reach the sublime level of Troll II, it still cries out for an act of homage from Mike Nelson and co.

By the way: Israel is over-reacting to the Bostrom article, screaming about "blood libel" and anti-Semitism and racism and all the rest of it. In an impressive display of pro-forma indignation, the Israelis have pulled the press credentials of one of Sweden's most important newspapers, which now cannot report from Gaza. I'm sure the Israelis hated to do it.

I translated the Bostrom piece because I saw nothing anti-Semitic about it. Although the article received some combative commentary, nobody saw fit to defend the absurd premise that hatred of Jews informed the writing.

As we've seen in my earlier piece on the New Jersey affair, former IDF officer Geldaya Tauber Gadyn testified in court that an Israeli government official named Ilan Peri ran an international organ theft ring. The heroic Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who has risked her life researching a book about the worldwide organ theft trade, identified Peri as the man behind the New Jersey kidney ring run by Isaac Rosenbaum. Perhaps the Israelis will now try to argue that Gady is an anti-Semite.

The reason why Israel decided to hammer Sweden is obvious: This is intimidation. They want all journalists to think thrice before looking into the organ trade. The Israelis know that if this story is pursued, someone out there will eventually publish the Gady/Peri/Rosenbaum connection. And that would mean real trouble, the kind of trouble that can't be deflected by playing the "Racist!" card.

Nevertheless, I suspect that -- one of these days -- that linkage will come out in the mainstream press. Remember where you read about it first.

I'd still like to know why it is all right to talk about organ theft conducted by Chinese, Brazilians and Pakistanis, but not by Israelis.