Tuesday, January 06, 2009

BAD MEDICINE


Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert (pictured above) recently arrived in Gaza ostensibly to support the humanitarian aid effort at Al Shifa Hospital. According to Wikipedia he is also "solidarity worker and politician" with "broad range international experiences, in particular from locations that merge medical and political issues."

If we cut the bullshit out of that description, we're left with the fact that he's out there to act as a propaganda mouth piece for the Hamas regime. Gilbert is not simply the medicine man who arrived out of the blue but a partisan observer who has long been active in pro Palestinian organizations in Norway, a member of a revolutionary socialist party and an apologist for the 9/11 mass murderers: -

"I am upset over the terrorist attack, but is equally upset over the suffering which the United States has created. It is in this context 5,000 dead people must be seen. If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, they have also suppressed a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians is the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis."

I highlighted the word "but" because apologists for war criminals almost always have a "but" with which to justify criminal acts. "Suicide bombings are terrible but the bombers are under occupation". Get the picture?

It's also ironic that the doctor also seems to promote the cycle of violence theory which can be used to justify any futher violence after the initial act. For some reason however, this doesn’t give Israel the right to defend its own citizens from Hamas rocket attacks.

These days, although Gilbert is supposed to be operating on patients at Al Shifa Hospital (where Hamas leaders have been in hiding disguised as doctors and nurses), the peripatetic Doctor Mads is becoming quite a media celebrity as the front man for the Hamas media road show. He is not only in contact with Norwegian media but is fast becoming a regular on CNN, BBC, ABC and Al Jazeera and is appearing daily accusing the Israel of murder and making a diverse range of other unsubstatiated and fanciful claims including that the Israeli’s are using "fuel air explosives and depleted uranium" in missions against Hamas - Attacks condemned as supplies dwindle and deaths rise.

Gilbert is playing games with his readers here because there is no evidence to support his statements. Nor is there any record of Israeli use of depleted uranium which is used only for anti-tank kinetic energy penetrators. Since Hamas does not have a single tank, the Israelis certainly have no use for depleted uranuim in Gaza.

Further, the claim that Israel has a depleted uranium tipped bomb is a fiction – no such weapon exists except in the fertile imaginations of pro-Hizbullah propagandists from back in the Second Lebanon War days. And now, it seems in the mind of Dr. Gilbert who made his mind up about these imaginary weapons within days of arriving in Gaza and without any apparent scientific analysis of anything to support his nonsensical conclusions.

I have no problem with Gilbert, the international humanitarian aid worker, but he is also a propagandist who has shown with his fantasising about depleted uranium and other wild accusations levelled at Israel that he can't be trusted. As such, should not be given the credibility associated with appearances on international news services.

While Gilbert is in the spotlight ranting about a shortage of medicine available to Gazans, perhaps the media might deign to investigate reports that Hamas has set up an independent hospital in the Gaza Strip to treat operatives wounded in fighting with the IDF. According to this report in the Jerusalem Post, Hamas "is pilfering a significant portion of the medicine allowed into the strip."

Sadly for the people of Gaza, I somehow doubt that the thought of Hamas stealing medicine from them is going to make this doctor mad at all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder how many Gazan children are dying at Al Shifa because Herr Doktor was too busy performing before the media circus to operate on them?

Anonymous said...

This CNN Report from yesterday http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/05/gaza.humanitarian/index.html
says:

Doctor in Gaza: Patients 'lying everywhere'

When are we going to read the truthful report titled:

Patient in Gaza: Doctors 'lying everywhere'

????