It was the Conservative politician Nigel Lawson who said that “the National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood.” This sainted status has taken a few knocks in recent years, with an increasing number of doctors being struck off for malpractice. My own local hospital, the Royal Sussex County at Brighton, where my mother-in-law died during a routine operation, is currently being investigated by the police for more than 200 cases of serious harm and death.

To NHS negligence can be added malevolence, with a tiny minority of doctors appearing to be alarmingly enthusiastic at the rise of antisemitism in the United Kingdom. Douglas Murray wrote in the Spectator: “In NHS hospitals, Jewish people no longer feel safe. A top doctor was suspended last month after a series of ‘anti-Semitic’ tweets. Dr. Ellen Kriesels, a consultant pediatrician at a north London hospital, described Hamas as ‘oppressed resistance fighters, not terrorists.’”

“The account linked to Dr. Kriesels also claimed that efforts ‘to frame the Jews as victims’ were ‘ridiculous’ and ‘excruciating.’ Another NHS surgeon was this week struck off after referring to another social media user as ‘circumcised vermin’, while a junior doctor who made a ‘slit your throat’ gesture to Jewish protestors escaped suspension after an initial tribunal found she had a ‘right to freedom of expression’.” 

This last charmer was a Holocaust-denier and pogrom-celebrator, Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, who called another London hospital a “Jewish supremacy cesspit.” Despite this, the tribunal ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to establish that Dr. Aladwan posed a risk to patients, and that allowing her to continue practicing would not undermine public confidence in the medical profession. Understandably the Campaign Against Antisemitism stated that the decision was “one of the most egregious examples we have encountered of a regulator failing in its duty to protect the public … it is inconceivable that a Jewish person would feel safe receiving treatment from this doctor.”

Then there’s the Egyptian doctor working at Liverpool who beat a deportation challenge even though she reposted footage of festival-goers running from Hamas terrorists with the words, “If it was your home, you would stay and fight,” accompanied by a smiling face emoji. A Malayan Muslim GP working in Scotland was pleasingly detained by Israeli security while on the HMS Virtue Signalling.

Worst of all, the murdering jihadi (first name: Jihad) who recently attacked a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur is blessed with an NHS surgeon father who posted on Facebook of the October 7 slaughter that it was “a miracle.” Nearly 500 complaints of antisemitism relating to 123 doctors have been submitted to the General Medical Council since October 7, 2023. 

At last the promising young minister for health, Wes Streeting, has stepped into this murderous melee, telling the Times that the National Health Service is “completely failing to protect Jewish patients … two years on from the horrific events of October 7th and just days after a despicable attack on our nation’s Jewish community, we must be unequivocal that antisemitism has absolutely no place in our NHS, or anywhere in our society. It should go without saying that doctors making racist comments about Jewish people is abhorrent and demands action. Yet all too often, appropriate action by regulators has been sorely lacking.”

Now it’s being mooted that doctors accused of antisemitism will be stripped of their licenses to practice before their tribunal; though it seems to contradict the principle of being innocent until proven guilty, the level of sorrow and fear amongst British Jews calls for serious action. A friend of mine felt so intimidated by the open support for Hamas on one London hospital ward that she begged her sick Gentile husband not to let anyone know she was Jewish lest it affect his treatment. 

Of course, evil people exist in all professions. Yet there’s something especially scary about such a doctor; you’re at your weakest point and at the mercy of a man with a scalpel. It doesn’t help when one considers how many doctors were willing to do their worst in the extermination camps; I was shocked to discover that during the Weimar Republic, more than half of all German doctors were early joiners of the Nazi Party, outdoing all other professions.

While the vast majority of doctors go into the profession because they want to help people, there will always be a tiny minority who do so because they want to hurt people. The words “Physician, heal thyself” have a long and sinister history, from the death camp medics to the British medical profession and its shameful attitude to the already bullied and beleaguered British Jews.

https://julieburchill.substack.com/p/halfling-a-farewell-to-legs