Sickening: The Anti-Semitic agenda of the UK medical journals

Sickening: The Anti-Semitic agenda of the UK medical journals
A recent letter published in The Lancet harshly criticized Israel, whilemaking wild accusations. But this is merely another link in the chain of biased and misleading publications in UK medical journals. “This is the classic Anti-Semitism, returning in a new edition”, say experts in Israel.

Dr. YaffaShir-Raz
Of all the Anti-Israel Anti-Semitic bashes Israel has suffered since the beginning of operation “Protective Edge”, from demonstrations and violent incidents in London, Paris and Milan, to popular artists such as Rihanna’s and Selena Gomezes pro-Hamas tweets, one of the vicious and most disappointing bash is the “open letter” published on July 23rd in one of the world’s leading general medical journals The Lancet.
“War crime”, “massacre”, “insult to humanity, intelligence, and dignity as well as our professional ethics and efforts” – these are just some of the hostile allegations towards Israel’s conduct during the operation made in this Anti-Israeli letter. The letter, signed by 24 doctors and scientists, harshly condemned the IDF’s activity in the Gaza Strip and calling on the world not to “remain silent while this crime against humanity continues”. Furthermore, the writers allegedthat Israel has “used gas”, which if “further confirmed, this is unequivocally a war crime for which, before anything else, high sanctions will have to be taken immediately upon Israel with cessation of any trade and collaborative agreements with Europe”.
Alongside the short version of the letter, The Lancet added an online form, allowing readers to join the list of signatories. Nearly 16,000 people have signed the petition so far.
 Despite the shock expressed last week by many Israeli doctors and members in the Health Ministry and in the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) in view of this radical, one-sided letter, those who follow the UK medical journals, and mainly The Lancet and BMJ in recent years, shouldn’t be too surprised.
A history of hostility towards Israel
The Lancet and its’ editor-in-chief since 1995, Dr. Richard Horton, have a history of a hostile agenda towards Israel, and of utilizing science and the scientific stage to accuse Israel, Israeli doctors and the IMA, for occupation, forsystematic violations of human rights, as well as for torturing and killing civilians in cold blood.
A quick review of the medical information data base, Medline, reveals the obsession in which the journal focuses on Israel since the mid-1990s, about the time Horton was appointed to its’ editor. For example, an editorial published in The Lancet on 1997 claimed that IMA is a silent partner in human rights violations.
On April 2002, following operation “Defensive Shield”, The Lancet published an article accusing the IDF of firing at ambulances, and of preventing wounded Palestinians from receiving medical attention and care. In the article the IMA was also blamed for blatantly disregarding medical neutrality and other internationally agreed rules of conflict.
In the same spirit, on January 2009, following operation “Cast Lead”, The Lancet published another editorial, claiming that Israel was responsible for “large indiscriminate human atrocities”, and for the “destruction of Gaza’s health system”.
The editorial accused the worldwide medical institutions as well, for keeping silence and therefore of being a collaborator to the massacre.
In addition to the clear slant in this type of articles published in The Lancet, the “facts” of the articles are questionable. This was documented in an article posted on the website Lancet Global Health, entitled “The wounds of Gaza”. The article – a piece of fiction at best and slander at worst, accused Israel for using “unconventional weapons” – silent bombs which are “extremely destructive”, and create “a large area where all objects and living things are vaporized with minimal trace”. “We are unable to fit this into conventional weapons”, the authors wrote, “but the possibility of new particle weapons being tested should be suspected”. The article was withdrawn shortly after it’s’ publication due to “factual inaccuracies”, but continues to be published in pro-Palestinians websites.
Misinformation and Bias
But Horton did much more than publishing sporadic Anti-Israeli letters and editorials.
In 2009 Horton founded the “Lancet-Palestinian Health Alliance”. The alliance’s seemingly purpose was to examine and promote the health care situation in Gaza, and within this framework, annual conferences have been held since 2009, and many articles have been published, devoted to charging Israel for assaulting Palestinians. On July 2, 2010, following the 2nd Lancet-Palestinian Health Alliance Conference, The Lancet published a series of articles under the name “best peer-reviewed abstracts” (The Lancet Series).
The website HonestReporting examined the Lancet series, which, in contrary to the basic rule in medical journals, was published without a declaration of conflicts of interest by its authors or promoters, and pointed out that most of the authors in the Lancet series are active supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. As for the abstracts, the organization said they combine to create an overall bias against Israel, accusing it in violating human rights and committing war crimes, and repeatedly call Gaza “occupied Palestinian territory”, despite the fact that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
For example, one abstract describes how “On Feb 28, the day that international contributors to the conference were arriving in Ramallah, hundreds of Israeli settlers, escorted by Israeli security forces, stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. There was tension in the air; the smell of violence everywhere; and denial or restricted access from one part of the West Bank to another and to East Jerusalem”. Of course, writes HonestReporting, there was no such incident of storming into the Al-Aqsa Mosque by anyone let alone “hundreds of Israeli settlers”.
Another article, titled “Effect of emergency health insurance scheme on place of birth in the West Bank during conflict: a retrospective analysis”, claimed that “pregnant mothers were denied access to hospitals for birth care”.
Another abstract worth particular noting was presented by HallaShoaibi, “Childbirth at checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory”. Shoaibi determines, and Horton, in his editorial, concurs, that “a legal analysis of the evidence of denial of free movement for Palestinian women in labor… supports the conclusion that Israel’s policy is consistent with the criteria for crimes against humanity”.
Horton himself exploits his position to slander Israel more than once. In anarticle published in TheNew York Review of Books on March 15, 2007, he blamed Israel for Palestinian healthcare problems. “Procurement of medicines is difficult”, he wrote, neglecting to inform readers that the Palestinian Authority government refused to receive aid in medications from Israel and instead demanded that the sum – $11 million dollars – be delivered in cash. In 2010, following his visit to Gaza, he wrote a letter to the Guardian, responding to an article by Ron Prosor, who at the time was Israel’s Ambassador in the UK. According to Prosor, “The people of Gaza are experiencing continued declines in child health, unchecked burdens of chronic disease, shortages of life-saving medical supplies and equipment, and the dramatic erosion of mental health”. 
“These unprecedented hardships are a direct consequence of Israel’s disregard for the health and security of people who they, as occupiers, have a legal duty to protect…”, Horton responded in his letter.
As mentioned above, The Lancet is not the only medical journal which systematically disrupts Israel and IMA. The British Medical Journal (BMJ), another leading journal in this field, published in 1995 an article titled “Israeli Medical Association shirks ‘political aspects’ of torture”. “There is a body of evidence, collated by both domestic and international human rights organizations, of the longstanding use of torture in Israel as an instrument of state policy that cannot be ignored”, wrote the authors of this article. “This material also documents the questionable role of doctors in army units and detention centers as well as the persistent silence of the Israeli medical establishment”.
An even more blatant article was published in 2003, and accused IMA and Dr. YoramBlachar, who at the time was IMA president’s, in a “collusion of doctors with torture”.
HonestReporting claims that the articles detailing human rights abuses in BMJ seem to focus on Israel in an almost distorted fashion. The website asked Dr. Simon Fishman, a physician, to search PubMed for citations in medical journals relating to victims of international conflicts, including Palestinians, as well as a whole range of genuine health care issues, such as the psychological effects of war in Rwandan, Bosnian and Darfurian children, HIV testing in Rwanda, and other studies that are not necessarily focused on death tolls from such conflicts. Using the casualty figures from a range of conflict zones as a simple judge of scale produced the following results:

Ethnic group
Years covered
No. of people killed
Total citations in Pubmed
Total citations in BMJ
Ratio of Death to citations in BMJ per year
Palestinians
2000-2004
1,508
2,479
29
13
Bosnians
1991-1996
200,000
1,993
20
2,000
Rwandans
1994
800,000
1,267
20
40,000
Sudanese (Darfur)
2002-2006
400,000
121
14
7,143
Kurds
1998
180,000
55
0
Negligible

Dr. Fishman concluded the following from his figures: When Europeans kill Europeans (Bosnia), the BMJ allocates one citation for every 2000 deaths; When Africans kill Africans (Rwanda), the BMJ allocates one citation for every 4000 deaths; When Muslim Arabs kill Black Africans (Darfur), the BMJ allocates one citation for every (minimum) 7000 Darfurians who are killed; When Israelis, in the process of combating terrorists, kill Palestinians, the BMJ allocates one citation for every 13 Palestinians killed (including terrorist combatants); When Arab Muslims kill Kurds, the BMJ fails to give this any attention whatsoever.
What can Israel do?
What can Israel do to face of these harsh systematic attacks against the state, the army and Israeli doctors in medical journals? So far, the Israeli response amounted mainly to local response letters and articles by physicians and members of the IMA.  
For example, a group of senior Israeli doctors, including Dr. YoramBlachar; Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, editor-in-Chief of IMAJ (Israel Medical Association Journal)and Head of Department of Medicine B and Center for Autoimmune Diseases, Tel Hashomer; Prof. Joshua Shemer, CEO of health Care Services, and others, wrote a response to a line of Anti-Israeli articles published in the Lancet and BMJ in 2009. Their response, titled “British Medical Journals Play Politics”, was published in IMAJ.
The article, accompanied by a response letter by other doctors and researchers, including Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, protested against The Lancet and the BMJ’s misleading accusations. The authors argued that the focus on Israel is almost distorted, and have presented data and information about Israel’s medical activity in Gaza, and about numerous Israeli-Palestinian collaborative health care initiatives, including about special Israeli programs, such as “Save a Child’s Heart” – an Israeli-based international humanitarian project, whose mission is to repair congenital heart defects for childrenfrom developing countries – approximately half of them are from the West Bank and Gaza.
In 2009, following the publication of Shoaibi’s abstract, Dr. Leonid Eidelman, AMI’s president and head department of Anesthesiology at Beilinson Hospital, turned to the ombudsman of The Lancet, Professor Charles Warlow, raising his concerns regarding the faulty data used in the abstract and on the appropriateness of such a questionable “scientific” article in a medical journal. In his reply, the ombudsman wrote to Dr. Eidelman that although he shares his concerns about the validity of the data and the jump to the International Courts in the ‘interpretation’ of those data, these concerns “are not very directly linked” to his role as Ombudsman, and that he has “no say in editorial decisions”. He suggested that Dr. Eidelman write a letter to the editor “in the hope that he will publish”.
Following this suggestion, Dr. Eidelman did, in fact submit a letter to the Editor under the title “Should The Lancet serve as a platform for a political agenda disguised as science?”. The Lancet’s senior editor responded by informing him that they had decided not to publish his letter, withoutproviding any specific explanation.
“This is classic Anti-Semitism”
“The response to such wild, baseless and libelous accusations in a scientific journal should have been a libel suit”, says Dr. Yair Bar, head of the lung at the Oncology Institute at Sheba Medical Center, who initiated and wrote a response letter signed by Sheba’s doctors. Dr. Bar has read the Lance’s publication last week at midnight, leafing through his emails at the end of a long work day. “I couldn’t believe my eyes”, he says. “Each paragraph in the letter was another bomb of hatred towards Israel, without any reference to facts or to the other side of the conflict – that Hamas is a terrorist organization which commits war crimes”.
“Somehow, it’s easier to understand demonstrations of Arab immigrants in the streets of Europe, than to see how the editor of the Lancet gives a stage to such a shocking letter. Reading this letter, you understand that our advocacy is at its lowest ebb”.
According to Prof. Eli Avraham, chairman of the ISEF Foundation and head of the Comper Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism at the Haifa University, the medical papers’ attack on Israel is not merely Anti-Israeli, but also Anti-Semitic. “It is commendable that researchers seek justice, but when they pose different standards on Israel than they do to the rest of the world and require them only from Israelis, it is precisely the classic Anti-Semitism, returning in a new edition, and in its heart stands the idea that Jews should be treated differently than other people”.
“The problem we are facing now is that unlike us, the Palestinians have devoted years to advocacy efforts”, says Prof. Abraham. “These efforts have focused considerably on academic institutions – in an attempt to influence universities and scientists. We on the other hand, have neglected the field of communication for years, and have settled for local reactions to the attacks, in which we tried to explain the righteousness of our struggle. Now we are paying the price, in the form of expansion of Anti-Israeli attacks to the pages of elite scientific journals”.
The problem: The Israeli Publicity
According to Prof. Abraham, in order to fight the trend, it is necessary to join forces, to recruit doctors, doctors’ organizations, the government, Jewish organizations and supporters of Israel, to invest and to use professional strategies. Such strategies focus on the source of the message – the medical journals and their editors, the message itself, and the target audience. “There is a lot we can do”, he says. “As for the source of the message, we can show the obsessive preoccupation of the journal and editor with Israel and the systematic bias against Israel, we can contact the journal’s owner or management, so that they will intervene and explain to the editors they are mistaken.
Alternatively, we can try to apply sanctions against the journal or threaten to file a libel suit, recruiting legal organizations, and Jewish and Israeli human rights groups such as the “Israel Law Center”, who fight against Anti-Semitism using legal methods.
“In addition, it is important to use audience strategies. In this case, the audience of the paper includes doctors and medical students – an audience to whom issues such as human rights, human dignity and the protection of the weak are important. The attackers are exploiting this fact, using the ‘victim tactic’. But then, we can relate to those characteristics of the audience as well, and explain how Israel is actually connected to the implementation of human rights. For example, in projects such as “Save a child’s heart”, or as the field hospital we have opened for Palestinians during the war”.
“since the journals which slander Israel are mostly British, it is important to try to show the similarity of our situation today in the war, to the one that the UK was involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – for example, the number of civilians killed in Iraq, which was 66 thousand out of 110 thousand dead, or to quote the words of Colonel Richard Kemp, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, who explained that no other army in the world has ever done more than Israel to save the lives of innocent civilians in a combat zone, and that Israeli medical technology saves British soldiers’ lives every day. Equally as important as the content of the message, is the channel in which it is transmitted to the audience. In the social network era, rather than simply respond to articles with letters sent to the journal, we can override the journal by creating a Facebook page to communicate with doctors throughout the world”.
 Express disgust at the false propaganda
“It is vital not to ignore the slanders and to act”, says Dr. Eidelman. “We would be more than happy to establish a publicity campaign in the social networks, but unfortunately, the IMA isn’t prepared for a constant campaign of such. The question is who will pick up the gauntlet. The State of Israel is responsible for the public diplomacy. Unfortunately, the country’s Public relations and publicity probably are not good enough”.
In addition to a response letter written by Dr. Eidelman and Health Ministry Director Prof. ArnonAfek to the Lancet, IMA also sent a letter to the British ambassador in Israel and contacted the Israeli ambassador in Britain, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, the Prime Minister’s spokesman and the national publicity system, and addressed to the Chairman of the Science and technology Committee in the Knesset, asking for an urgent discussion in the Knesset on the use of scientific-academic disguise to attack Israel.
“IMA received many support letters from colleagues around the globe, including the management of DARA (Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), who sent a letter to all its members asking them to send responses to the Lancet’s editor, expressing disgust at the false propaganda against Israel”, says Dr. Eidelman. “We continue to consider additional measures, such as contacting Elsevier, The Lancet’s publisher, reviewing journalistic ethics regarding medical papers and a possible complaint on ethical ground”.

The article was edited in English by Attorney Osnat Schwartz-Kershberg, a commercial lawyer.