A Doctor Writes ..

Melanie Phillips brings to our attention a remarkable British Medical Journal piece - remarkable for its lack of relevance to medicine and its hatred for Israel.

Mel adds "The comments by BMJ readers are worth reading too. Many are outraged, thank goodness. Too many, though, support him."

There aren't that many supporters in the comments though - they're overwhelmingly critical of the BMJ's editor for publishing a political diatribe in a medical journal.

One supporter, though, does have three posts.

Dr Mark W Struthers, a Bedford GP, says "There is something curiously depressing about the predictable outrage and denial engendered by Derek Summerfield’s personal view on war crimes and the health of the Palestinian people ... The US, as always, shows utter contempt for international law and international convention. Israel now follows its master’s footsteps with complete impunity in its suicidal war on terror. Both countries stand as outlaws, as international renegades."

Dr Struthers is a prolific poster to the BMJ bulletin boards. But it isn't the Jew which is the main problem.


On the death penalty (a tiny sample).

"The problem for the rest of the world is that Americans insist on exporting their insanity, their humanity deficit and insist on inflicting the consequences of their thirst for revenge on the rest of us.

The need for vengeance is deeply rooted in the American psyche and state sanctioned killing is very much the will of the people in this fiercely democratic country.

Americans do not care.

Americans are in a mess. America is a moral wasteland and an appalling example to the world. It would be rational to abolish the death penalty but it would not be American.

Next week, the Commander in chief, the Lord High Executioner and chief purveyor of American values, George W Bush is honouring the United Kingdom with a state visit. He will be staying at Buckingham Palace and dining with the Queen. It is simply outrageous.

Degenerate nation.

Barbarians."

On the Iraq war :

The bombs will soon be raining down on Baghdad.

This will be an American war and will be conducted the American way. We know the American way because we've seen it before; in Vietnam the destruction was immense. In the next few days the scale of killing in Iraq will be colossal. With the gun and the Bible the Americans are going to do what they do best - human slaughter - and with their brand of twenty-first century indiscriminate precision.

In Vietnam the US forces always feared that the Vietcong hid out within the civilian population. The fear will be no different in Iraq and with the current aversion to 'body bags' the answer will be the pre- emptive obliteration of Baghdad.

It will be necessary to destroy Baghdad and its people in order to save it from Saddam - and to conserve empty American ‘body bags’.

Arab and Vietnamese lives are not equivalent to those of American and can be squandered at American will. Is it any wonder that people hate America?

Some misguided people seem to think that the battle for Baghdad in 2003 is an exchange of blood for oil. Of course it is preposterous to imagine that the King of Oil, the Texan Commander-in-Chief of this great warring nation is interested in the Iraq's massive oil reserves. The real motive for the impending carnage of course is 'vengeance'.

Let the cowboy crusade commence.

Competing interests: I am a Labour Party member - for the moment.


On health insurance :

“It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.”

Eldridge Cleaver, a black American radical, wrote these words in 1968 during America’s bloody war on the Vietnamese people. It is extraordinary that the supersonic jet liner is still up in the air, hanging on in there and circling the globe. However, the crash to earth will come – and sometime soon.

Ah, yes - 1968. That would have been around the time Eldridge Cleaver was describing rape as an insurrectionary act. But he grew up in the end and repented his sins, becoming a Christian, a Republican, and a crack addict - quite a trinity. Cleaver grew up in poverty and ignorance, a tough street kid, living the gangsta life before the phrase existed. What's the good doctor's excuse ?

Half the air traffic controllers are off sick and the rest are dozing. The pilot burbles meaningless words of freedom and democracy to God and the fearful. The co-pilot is after riches and revenge and doesn’t give a damn for anyone or anything. They’ve both suspended rational communication and switched off the aircraft's radio.

The passengers are doomed.

It won’t be long before this benighted jet plane spirals out of control and hits the deck with an enormous bang and lots of flames.

Tasteful or what ?

Even the trial (and subsequesnt release) of Sally Clark after expert testimony by Professor Roy Meadows rouses the ire :

Perhaps Sally Clark can take some crumb of comfort in her predicament that her 'crime' didn't take place in the USA. The Americans take a very dim view of child killers and over there she would undoubtedly now be sitting it out on death row. The Americans have reserved places on death row for white, educated, middle income women to counterbalance the young, black, poor males who they usually like to kill.



American ? In Bedford ? I'd go private if I were you.