British Medical Journal is a rag, not objective, has anti-Israel bias - comment

Open Letter to the British Medical Journal:

On the morning of July 7, 2005, a bomb exploded on a Number-30 double-decker bus in London’s Tavistock Square opposite BMA House – the venerable and palatial headquarters of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the British Medical Journal. The suicide bomber, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, was believed to have been thwarted in his original intention to detonate his 4.5 kg. bomb on a London underground train.

BMA House is very near the University College London, the BBC (which is today blatantly anti-Israel and has had to “apologize” for several false reports since October 7), the British Museum, and the National Gallery.

A total of 52 people died and more than 800 were injured in the blast, which The BMJ and many other British publications described as a “terrorist attack” committed by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. This group, founded in 1988, views itself as the spearhead of a global revolution to unite the Muslim world under an Islamic state that transcends national boundaries. It doesn’t like Christians any more than it likes Jews.

The explosions were caused by improvised explosive devices made from a white crystalline powder combining acetone that had been hidden in backpacks. Flesh and blood splattered on the walls of BMA House whose construction began on the Tavistock Square site in 1911. The medical journal reported that physicians in the building helped the wounded before ambulances arrived. Then-editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee praised the staff for their efforts to produce the journal without interruption from a contingency site as the “best answer to those who would tear our world apart.” 

The BMJ's anti-Israel bias

ON DECEMBER 4 of this year, I wrote a news article as The Jerusalem Post’s health and science reporter about a shockingly unfair and anti-Israel editorial published in BMJ Global Health – owned by the BMJ Group but with its own editor, Nigerian/Australian associate Prof. Seye Abimbola. It was entitled “Violence in Palestine demands an immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes.”

My article quoted four prominent Israeli medical academics and a senior legal expert who wrote a strong letter of protest to BMJ Global Health. The Israelis charged that the editorial “completely ignored the events of October 7, when Hamas terrorists raped, burnt, mutilated, tortured and killed entire families and took women, children, and the elderly hostage. In addition, it is full of distortions and obfuscations… In a perfect example of fake news, the authors refer to the bombing  as representing one of the most horrific attacks on a healthcare facility in our collective facility. In fact, the hospital bombing was well documented by nearly all reputable sources to have been the result of terrorists’ failed firing from within Gaza and not an Israeli airstrike.”

Clearly, the Israelis wrote, those who wrote the editorial that “lacks any scientific value… consider all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank as belonging to the Palestinians. It refers to alleged ‘implementation of eliminatory settler colonial strategies by the Israeli occupation that aims to increase morbidity and mortality…’ Besides the fact that Gaza has not been occupied by Israel since 2007, and putting aside for a moment the thousands of patients from Gaza (including Hamas terrorists!) that have been treated in Israeli hospitals, and Gazan physicians trained in Israeli hospitals. If Israel is trying to increase morbidity and mortality, [it] is doing a very poor job of it,” they continued.

“Since Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, they have done everything possible, including diverting humanitarian aid for terrorist purposes, to ensure these conditions persist,” the Israelis declared. The terrorists have even stolen many tens of thousands of liters of fuel meant for humanitarian purposes. Israel provides the Gaza Strip water, food, and electricity from its own supplies during times of peace and allows the transport of basic humanitarian aid even during times of war.

When bombers act in London, The BMJ recognizes them as “terrorists,” but when they are much more vicious and ruthless and are perpetrated against Israelis, they are “militants.” The BMJ can’t boast that it is objective, as it has become anti-Israel.

I MYSELF am well familiar with The BMJ, which is one of the world’s oldest general medical journals that launched its first weekly edition in 1840. Its current editor-in-chief is Dr. Kamran Abbasi, a physician, journalist, and broadcaster.

Decades ago, BMJ editors asked me to serve as its freelance Israel Medical News Correspondent. I agreed, and for years, I wrote scores of widely read articles on discoveries coming from this country’s researchers and physicians that benefited mankind. I was so proud to write for the journal, telling the world from Jerusalem about the accomplishments of Israeli medicine.

The BMJ even invited me along with about a dozen of its other medical news correspondents from various countries to visit the journal. My only condition was that I could get kosher food, and at the banquet held in our honor, before everyone began to eat, a rabbi marched in and ceremoniously placed before me a kosher meal triple-wrapped in aluminum foil that had been heated up. Everyone gaped at me, but I learned later that quite a few of the reporters were in fact Jewish, albeit not consumers of kosher food. 

During one of Israel’s wars against Lebanon whose Hezbollah terrorists incessantly bombarded our northern border, a BMJ news editor told me they were “sick of Israel” and that from now on, they would accept only “negative stories” about my country and “nothing positive.” I immediately resigned and stopped reading the journal because I felt the editors were not practicing fair journalism in which I always believed. When numerous Israeli physicians called me to ask why I stopped, I told them. They all said they would cancel their BMJ subscriptions, and I venture that it has very few Israeli subscribers today.

The editors apparently forgot the Blitz that began on September 7, 1940 – ‘Black Saturday’ – when Nazi bombers attacked London, leaving 430 dead and 1,600 injured. Well, we Israelis now have our own ‘Black Saturday” – October 7, 2023. Since then, many tens of thousands of guided missiles and rockets have been hurled at Israel by Iranian-backed Hamas, and more by Iranian-backed Hezbollah. Many Israelis have died and homes, businesses, agricultural fields and infrastructure destroyed, but fortunately, our Iron Dome air-defense system has intercepted nearly all of them.

But Israel’s southern communities have endured decades of missile attacks by ISIS-like Hamas that has now murdered so many Israelis; raped and slaughtered more than 360 people at a music festival; tortured and burned Israeli families alive; beheaded live babies, children, women, and men they pulled out of their beds, forced children to watch and then murdered them. They kidnapped toddlers and children on motorcycles, pressing their legs against the burning-hot exhaust to mark their skin so they couldn’t escape. And Hamas still holds 124 hostages of all ages in Gaza. 

All these Nazi-inspired atrocities are clear violations of International Human Rights Law that prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life; torture, cruel or degrading treatment or punishment; slavery and forced labor; arbitrary arrest or detention; arbitrary interference with privacy; war propaganda; discrimination; and advocacy of racial or religious hatred. 

Ideologically, The BMJ today is a rag. Shame on you.

The writer is The Jerusalem Post’s health and science reporter.