Doctors against Deception

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WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 07: (L-R) U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) speak at a press conference on the Israel-Hamas war outside of the U.S. Capitol on December 07, 2023 in Washington, DC. A group of Democratic lawmakers joined by members of Doctors Against Genocide called on a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The US-based NGO ‘Doctors Against Genocide’ refers to itself as “a Global Health Coalition committed to stopping genocide.”  So far, so anodyne.  You would never know that it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – or, better said, in white coat and scrubs.  The very same garb, incidentally, that Doctors Against Genocide cynically urges its sympathizers to don before participating in its photo-op protests outside the White House and the Israeli embassy.

Yes, you read that right – anti-genocide protests outside the Israeli embassy.  Oy vey.

The ‘About us’ section of its website defines Doctors Against Genocide as a “global coalition of healthcare workers dedicated to succeeding where global governments have failed in confronting and preventing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Our mission includes identifying, opposing, preventing, and eradicating genocide by uniting Healthcare Professionals in action.”  So laudable – if taken at face value.  And hopelessly wishful.  Perhaps the thinking goes: “If only a bunch of doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, podiatrists, physiotherapists and psychoanalysts had banded together, they could have successfully deterred Hitler from committing the Holocaust, or convinced the Hutus to spare the Tutsis in Rwanda.”   The thesis is entirely fanciful, if not grandiose.  It may be indicative of a God complex that is – rumor has it – not entirely uncommon among doctors (yours truly had been accused of being thus afflicted a mere handful of times early on in my professional training, before life casually had its way with me and instilled a healthy dose of humility).  Apparently, healthcare workers are not actually placed on Planet Earth to solve the world’s problems outside their specific area of expertise in health and medicine; go figure.

Yet, I don’t particularly mind fanciful; I might even argue that lofty, seemingly unattainable goals are sometimes the impetus for attainable, very real progress.  What I do mind is the truth distortion field that Doctors Against Genocide, founded only recently, in the aftermath of the IDF’s ongoing campaign against Hamas in Gaza, generates and operates in.  Consider for one that nowhere on its entire website could I find the words “Jews”, “Nazis” or “Holocaust”, suggestive of a willful ignorance of the historical example par excellence of genocide.  After all, the very word ‘genocide’ was coined in response to the Nazi’s implementation of their monstrous ‘Final Solution’ against the Jews.  Because the Holocaust is to genocide what the Bible is to holy books, Tom Brady to American football players, and Tesla to electric vehicles (in each case, not the only member of its category, but its poster child), the Holocaust’s omission from the NGO’s literature seems – to put it benevolently – curious.  If the “Confectioners For Candy” website made no mention of chocolate or sugar, that would be odd, wouldn’t it?

Next, consider another curious omission from the NGO’s website, namely that of Hamas’ attempted genocide against Israeli Jews on October 7.  The site makes no mention of the massacre or – for that matter – of Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to the extermination of Jews.

A third oddity is the half dozen times the site refers to the “Genocide in Gaza” (capitalized just like that, reminiscent of a movie or book title, which I suppose is apt for a work of fiction), including three prominent mentions on its home page alone.  The NGO appears to take a page out of Goebbels’s playbook: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  In fact, the website’s FAQ section notes, “currently Doctors Against Genocide’s operations are focused on ending the acute Genocide in Gaza.”  And there it is: le grand dénouement.  What Doctors Against Genocide actually is, is A Group of Mostly Muslim Healthcare Workers Who Want to Stop the Jews from Winning Against Hamas.  Let us hope there is among its supporters a cardiologist, because at its heart lies a perfidious deception.  More about that later.

Doctors Against Genocide first came to my attention earlier this month, when it had the seemingly bright – if most definitely offensive – brainchild to stage a protest within the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and then, after much brouhaha over its intended public demand for an immediate ceasefire, gave up on the idea.  The museum issued a statement in which it quite rightly pointed out that “it is deeply offensive to survivors and to the memory of the victims to exploit Holocaust history.”

With Doctors Against Genocide’s principal purpose now helpfully revealed, let’s take a moment to examine the veracity of its postulate that a genocide is being committed against Gazans.  To do so, we fortunately need look no further than the site’s ‘Education’ section, which handily refers to the UN’s 1948 definition of genocide:

“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Before even contemplating whether Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to any one of the above acts, we ought to highlight the phrase “with intent” in the definition.  That the Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews, as the Hutus did the Tutsis, and the Ottomans the Armenians is incontrovertible: in each case, the perpetrators were quite explicit about it.  Ditto Hamas about its intentions towards Israeli Jews on October 7.

With respect specifically to Gazan civilians, whose ‘intent’ is being put under the spotlight here?  If it is that of Hamas, then perhaps there is a valid case to be made for genocide, as the leadership of the Islamist terrorists has made clear – through its words and deeds – that it is less than disinterested in safeguarding said civilians.

Israel on the other hand is quite explicit about not wanting to harm, let alone seeking to exterminate, them.  The IDF goes to great lengths to distinguish between the declared targets of its operations – Hamas combatants and their infrastructure – and the local civilian population.  It makes categoric distinctions between legitimate military targets and off-limits civilian sites.  The IDF has dropped millions of leaflets from the skies above Gaza, and placed hundreds of thousands of phone calls, urging civilians – in Arabic – to evacuate impending battlegrounds.  IAF fighter pilots have flown roof-knock missions – at great risk to their own lives – to warn civilians off specific targets.  Before each IDF operation, a panel of independent lawyers on whose authorization the operation depends, weighs the proportionality of its ostensible military gains against potential collateral damage to civilian lives and property.  In the current war, the IDF routinely foregoes the crucial element of surprise in order to prioritize the lives of Gazan civilians.  It did so in the three weeks prior to the ground invasion.  It did so prior to its raids of the many hospitals in which Hamas embedded itself.  And it is doing so again with the use of the digital map it created for the benefit of civilians in Gaza’s south, now that the battlefront has shifted there.

Of course, warfare is a very much imperfect science.  Of course, precision – as in ‘precision bombing’ – is a relative term.   Of course, mistakes will happen.  And of course, the IDF – like no army before it – is dealing with an exceptionally cruel enemy that has had 16 years to embed itself deep into the fabric of the local civilization, which – as far as the terrorists are concerned – primarily serves them as a human shield.  But all the evidence – once again, in words and in deeds – overwhelmingly points to Israel’s intent being to safeguard the Gazan civilian population.  If Israel has any intent to exterminate a group, it is towards Hamas – a perfectly legitimate military target.

But for the sake of argument, let’s for a moment assume – totally falsely and hypothetically, of course – that Israel actually intended to perpetrate a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.  For starters, Israel is widely assumed to have nuclear military capability, a capability used by the United States towards the end of its war with Imperial Japan, even though the US harbored no genocidal intent.  Had Israel wanted to flatten Gaza, it could have done so in self-defense on or immediately after October 7, and spared the lives of the nearly 200 Israeli soldiers who have tragically fallen in Gaza thus far.  But that is clearly incongruent with the values of the State of Israel: it is simply not the way of its current or any other Israeli government, however right-wing, nor of the IDF and Israeli society at large.

Moreover, let’s examine the question on purely empiric grounds, regardless of the issue of intent, of whether Israel is decimating the Palestinian population.  From 1946, 2 years before the founding of the State of Israel, the Gazan population in Gaza has steadily increased from around 150,000 (the figure a survey of Palestine prepared by the British Mandate for the United Nations included).  In 1970, says the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Gazan population was 340,000.  Forty years later, in 2010 (5 years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal) it was 1.6 million, i.e. nearly 5 times higher.  As of 2023, it exceeded 2 million.  According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, the fertility rate in the Gaza Strip in 2018 ranked 31st in the World, and its population growth 35th in the world, ahead of most Western democracies on both measures.  Apparently, Israel really sucks at ‘genocide’.  It must be doing something very wrong; these key performance indicators are just dismal.

In bleak contrast, the population of European Jewry during the twelve years of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945 declined by a devastating 6 million (from 9.5 million to 3.5 million), a decrease of over 60%.  A majority of European Jews, roughly two out of every three, was murdered.  During the IDF’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas, it is unknown precisely how many Palestinian civilian lives have been lost, but it is certainly less than 1%, even when one accepts the casualty figures provided by the blatantly compromised Gazan Health Ministry (a Hamas agency), which would have us believe that the IDF has thus far failed to kill any Hamas combatants whatsoever, that Hamas has not killed any Palestinian civilians whatsoever, and that Gazans stopped dying of natural causes whatsoever, when in truth that last number alone is expected – nearly three months into the war – to be about 2,000.

In sum, Doctors Against Genocide cynically misuses the trust our society generally extends its doctors and other healing professionals to lend legitimacy to an illegitimate claim: that there is currently a genocide of Palestinian civilians underway in Gaza.  The juxtaposition of this lie with a professional group we are all taught from a young age to trust and respect is perverse.  Doctors Against Genocide is a fig leaf to a fallacy, a front to sell a gullible world on the despicable fiction that Israelis are the new Nazis.

Consider too the banality of the idea that doctors object to genocide.  Of course they do.  So, presumably, do accountants, traffic wardens, make-up artists and any number of professional groups.  Equally banal, there is a multitude of the world’s ills that doctors would presumably decry in equally universal measure, ranging from global warming and rush-hour traffic to high taxes and long TSA lines, but an NGO of ‘Doctors Against’ any of these phenomena makes about as much sense as Doctors Against Genocide.  Another feature all of these social justice causes share in common is that in my medical school days I spent an equal number of days studying genocide, international law, global warming, taxes and rush-hour traffic: exactly zero.  The average American doctor knows about as much about Middle Eastern geopolitics and the rules of war as I know about cumulus clouds (hint: not much).

Further making the point of the group’s banality, it would be absurd to imagine the inverse of ‘Doctors Against Genocide’, in other words that there is a set of doctors in favor of genocide (not that I am blithely ignorant of the gruesome contribution by select Nazi doctors and nurses to the Holocaust).

People trust doctors (and nurses, osteopaths, chiropractors, therapists and other healthcare workers) because of their competence in their chosen caring profession.  It would make utter sense for members of this group to be against syphilis, cancer, depression and smoking.  ‘Doctors Against Diphtheria’ has a nice alliterative ring to it, and ‘Doctors Against Venous Embolisms’ – or DAVE for short – sounds friendly and approachable, like a guy you’d be willing to buy a pint down at the pub.  All of these are causes doctors could plausibly and validly support.  In contrast, genocide is a rung or two above their pay grades.  So why bother?

The answer lies in the identity of Doctors Against Genocide’s fiscal sponsor.   A fiscal sponsor allows a nonprofit organization that doesn’t itself have charitable status to indirectly collect tax-deductible donations.  Enter Jetpac, purportedly a 501-c3 nonprofit, of which Doctors Against Genocide is a program.  Jetpac is dedicated to “building American Muslim political infrastructure”.  Allahu help us!  Under the law, a fiscal sponsor is limited to supporting organizations that further its stated mission.  It is telling that Doctors Against Genocide obscures this central part of its agenda.  Recognizing it explains why the focus of Doctors Against Genocide is genocide committed against Muslims, and why its sweet spot is the postulated genocide of Muslims perpetrated by Jews, which shares with unicorns and Enron’s financial statements the quality of being made up.  It also explains why Doctors Against Genocide blissfully ignores the all-too-real opposite case, i.e. the October 7 attempted genocide of Jews committed by the Islamist mercenaries of Hamas.

Ultimately, the price Doctor Against Genocide pays for its inattention to the Holocaust is its failure to grasp the Holocaust’s most important lesson: in the end, the Nazis failed in their satanic quest to exterminate the Jews, and while they are long dead, the Jewish people lives.  As Jews, we will vigorously defend Israel from the blood libel Doctors Against Genocide is perpetrating, just as the IDF is defending Israel against Hamas on the actual battlefields in Gaza.   It is a position we are used to; Jews have been defending themselves for millennia.  “They tried to kill us, we survived, now let’s eat”, goes the old joke.  Only today, the Jewish people’s thriving ancestral homeland, Israel, is its Shining City on a Hill.  As the anthem rings: “We have still not lost our hope, a 2,000 year-long hope, of being a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”  Amen.