New York, NY, December 27, 2004 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is outraged at the broadcast of a new series on Iranian TV that portrays Israeli doctors harvesting organs from Palestinian children, the latest virulently anti-Semitic program to be rolled out by a network with a large audience in the Middle East.

The first two episodes of the new series, known alternately as Zahra's Blue Eyes and For You, Palestine, aired on Iran's Sahar-1 on December 13 and 20.  Further episodes are planned.  The dramatic series was filmed in Farsi and dubbed into Arabic.

"This is an example of the classical anti-Semitism that continues to fill the airwaves of the Middle East," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and author of Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). 

"Considering that Iran's official policy is to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we are not surprised at this kind of incitement of its population.  However, we are very much concerned that the Iranian series seems to suggest a copycat phenomenon is taking place in the Middle East media, since the Iranian series is literally taking cues from similar anti-Semitic series that have appeared in countries such as Lebanon and Egypt over the past few years."

Zahra's Blue Eyes depicts Israelis posing as employees of the United Nations who come to a Palestinian school on a pretext of checking the children for diseases, with the real objective of inspecting the class for the best eyes, according to translations provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and published on their Web site at www.memri.org.  Other scenes show Israeli doctors harvesting organs and Israeli politicians conspiring to take over the Middle East while harvesting the organs of non-Jews for profit.