What’s happening to our doctors? Researchers at an organisation called Do No Harm recently found that American healthcare professionals were more than two times likelier to be anti-Semitic than their share of the workforce, and that physicians are nearly 26 times overrepresented among individuals identified as having publicly shared anti-Semitic content. This is a worrying tendency which seems common across the West. A few weeks ago a UK-based doctor was accused of denying the Holocaust and celebrating the Hamas attacks of 2023; in August a doctor in Liverpool who praised Adolf Hitler was let back into work; a med-school student in Quebec was revealed in October to be the moderator of a Discord channel hosting anti-Semitic slurs; earlier this year two Australian nurses were suspended for threatening Jewish patients.
Might a doctor take it upon themselves to harm a Zionist or Israeli patient when they’re most vulnerable and completely defenceless? What if your child needs urgent care, but the on-call physician thinks you’re Jewish? Could they hurt your child in retaliation for the children killed in Gaza? What if you’re a person who’s publicly condemned Hamas? Might you be passed over in the queue for a treatment you need? Maybe you’ll be prescribed the wrong medication. These are not inconceivable scenarios.
Some of the victims of extremism in the healthcare sector have been other physicians. Data released by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario in December of last year found that nearly a third of all Jewish medical professionals in the province fear they may have to leave Canada because of anti-Semitism in the workplace. Likewise, another survey from the US, by the Israel advocacy organisation StandWithUs, found that since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza nearly 40 per cent of Jewish healthcare professionals have experienced anti-Semitism while on duty. More than 25 per cent of respondents said they fear for their safety.
With universities today as they are, and more and more medical professionals coming to the West from countries that have purged entire Jewish populations, this situation is going to worsen. Roughly a quarter of all US physicians were trained abroad, often in Middle Eastern countries where anti-Semitism and extremism are normalised. In Canada, 25 per cent of nurses, 42 per cent of nurses’ aides, 43 per cent of pharmacists, 40 per cent of physicians, and 45 per cent of dentists came from abroad. Not all foreign-born or foreign-trained medical professionals are anti-Semites, obviously, but some people coming from countries where Jews and other minorities have been persecuted for millennia will undoubtedly bring anti-Jewish and anti-western beliefs with them. As a writer for Tablet recently pointed out: ‘The challenge posed by foreign-trained doctors is that they arrive… after having largely completed their moral formation, sometimes in political systems that explicitly promote anti-Semitism in their schools. The anti-Semitism they openly display… may have been considered appropriate or even enlightened in their home countries.’
If governments, medical associations and universities don’t wake up to this issue, the reason you’re seeing a doctor could end up being the least of your concerns.
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