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Doctors and human rights

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The Israeli Medical Association and doctors’ complicity in torture

By John S Yudkin

(source: British Mediacal Journal)

A recent BMJ news report outlined the reasons behind the call by 725 doctors from 43 countries for the former chairman of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), Yoram Blachar, to step down as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).1 The doctors’ petition, addressed to Edward Hill, chairman of the WMA Council, documented a series of reports, going back to 1996,2 of cases in which Israeli doctors have been accused of complicity in torture and where the IMA had failed either to respond to or fully to investigate the charges. Although Dr Blachar is no longer the IMA president and concludes his term as WMA president this month, the petition still raises important questions concerning the IMA’s commitment to investigate and tackle possible complicity of Israeli doctors in the torture of prisoners and detainees.

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Priests letter to islamophobe

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By Revd Frank Julian Gelli

(source: Father Frank’s Rants-Rant Number 369)  

Open Letter to Islamophobe Dutch MP Geert Wilders
 
Dear Mr Wilders,
 
They say you can only take a horse to the water, you can’t make it drink. But human beings are not horses.  Unlike animals, they can be reasoned with. I offer these few remarks in the faint hope you are amenable to reason.
It is about your recent speech to the Alliance of Patriots in New York. In which you paint an apocalyptic picture of ‘the Islamization of Europe’. You describe some European cities with Muslim neighbourhoods in lurid terms. It is a world ‘where women walk around in figureless tents…Their husbands, or slave holders, if you prefer, walk three steps ahead’.

Mr Wilders, I live bang near one of those areas in West London. I often visit Whitechapel and Edgware Road – parts of our colourful Londonistan – I have never seen a Muslim woman walking behind her husband. Rather, the mothers stroll about in a proud, dignified manner, alongside the men. Nothing in their behaviour suggests a subordinate role, let alone slavery. And there are tons of lively, even feisty Muslim girls wearing all sorts of gear.

True, they may not, as a rule, behave like permissive, liberated females, baring the flesh, hugging and kissing partners in public, no. I would even guess most of them don’t sleep with boys before marriage. But since when are chastity, modesty and self-restraint so bad? The traditional, Christian mores of the Western civilisation which you claim to uphold used to prize such things, no?

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