Wiesenthal Centre to World Medical Association: “Resist Pressure to Expel Israel from World Medical Association (WMA)”

“It is ironic that the WMA ethical programme was born in the wake of World War II, when Nazi doctors committed inhuman experiments on children, exterminated the handicapped and murdered six million Jews and others.”

“The prejudices of seventy one British doctors bent on Israel's expulsion have turned them into ethics abortionists.”

Paris, 21 January 2016

In a letter to World Medical Association (WMA), President, Sir Michael Marmot, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, expressed horror that “the very mission of the World Medical Association (WMA) ethics programme is about to be impugned by a group of 71 British physicians intent on expelling the Israel Medical Association from your membership.”

Samuels noted, “it is indeed ironic that your history highlights the birth of the WMA in the wake of the Second World War... Medical ethics had been trashed as Nazi doctors and nurses committed inhuman experiments on children, exterminated the handicapped and murdered over six million Jews and countless others.”

The letter viewed it as “inconceivable to discriminate against the State of the Jewish victims and survivors,” asking, “on what grounds?”, arguing that “any unannounced visit to the hospitals of Israel – and especially Hadassah in Jerusalem – will show Arab doctors treating Jewish children and Jewish medical teams administering to Arab patients from across the Middle East, even from countries intent upon their destruction.”

Samuels stressed, “those same teams have served survivors of national catastrophes from Haiti to Turkey and regularly hold training programmes in Africa and Asia, even in states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel.”

The letter emphasized that, “Israeli medical research and development produces drugs without borders in the truest ethical spirit of the Hippocratic oath.”

The Centre urged the President, “to resist attempts to distort the WMA purpose. The late Simon Wiesenthal's axiom was “what starts with the Jews never ends with them.” Any expulsion would clearly damage the targetted national member association. Harming Israeli physicians would also damage their Palestinian colleagues and patients.”

“Perhaps this is the aim of the 71 doctors whose prejudices turn them into ethics abortionists,” concluded Samuels.