Mads Gilbert is a critic of US foreign policy and of Israel. He also happens to be a Norwegian emergency medicine specialist who is currently working inside Gaza.
As a doctor, he has shown up in TV reports describing the situation inside his medical facility. But as a critic of Israel/US policy he is under attack himself, from predictable quarters:
High-Profile Doctor in Gaza Called an ‘Apologist for Hamas’ — Fox News
Norwegian Doctors in Gaza: Objective Observers or Partisan Propagandists? — Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
Mads Gilbert — Doctor, Pundit, Shill for Terrorism — Harry’s Place
But there’s something to this beyond the crude smears and innuendo.
Gilbert and his colleagues repair people in conflict zones. But they have an uncomfortable world view. Take this Norwegian newspaper interview. In it, Gilbert condemns 9/11 but says that he can understand the justification for terrorism. His colleague Hans Husum, who treated Afghans fighting the USSR in the late 1980s, will perhaps give you a better idea of where Gilbert is coming from (warning: my translation):
In 1982 in Beirut, I treated a 12-year-old Palestinian boy. His name was Tariq, and his whole family, relatives and friends had been destroyed by the Israeli war machine. After several operations, I managed to salvage one badly injured arm, but he was so depressed he couldn’t talk or eat.
He had pulled through only to die of despair, until I said that he could shoot with his other hand. Then he decided to live and to be what Bush calls a terrorist. Do we have the right to require that the Tariqs of this world should just lie down and die?
Well, we don’t have that right. But we don’t have the right to license them to kill either.
When I said their world views were uncomfortable, I meant for us, not them. As Husum says elsewhere in the interview, he sees the world in black and white.
There are echoes in what both Gilbert and Husum say in the work of another medic, Frantz Fanon, who wrote The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon was writing in the context of the Algerian resistance to colonial occupation by France. Some French intellectuals, notably Sartre who wrote an introduction to the book, had themselves justified resistance to the Nazi occupation of France in WW2, and had come to see all political conflicts as a battle between the oppressors and the oppressed. Sartre wrote that “violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”
Gilbert has a long history of selfless medical service, but also of partisan commitment to “the oppressed.” In one version of the black and white account of Middle Eastern politics, that would be inhabitants of Gaza (Israeli supporters have their own version).
But that very commitment, which motivates him to journey to war zones (he’s been to Burma and countless other places), makes him a difficult witness. Or, at the very least, not a neutral observer. Does it make him a ‘shill’ for terrorism, or an ‘apologist’ for Hamas? I don’t think it does, but his moral compass is pointing one way. Still, without his — to my mind — flawed moral certainty, would Gilbert put his life on the line?
He certainly has a keen grasp of how to use viral SMS to get his message out. And it isn’t simply reporting. Here’s Menassat:
[O]n Monday, Scandinavian countries began receiving SMS alerts on their mobile phones giving eyewitness accounts from Gilbert telling of the situation from Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.
One message read obtained by MENASSAT read: “We are swimming in death, blood, and amputated victims. Many children. Pregnant women. I’ve never experienced anything so awful.”
In the SMS, Gilbert also claimed that Gaza’s main vegetable market had been bombed on Monday morning, killing 20 people and injured 80.
Gilbert’s messages eventually became a doctor’s cry for people to take action to pressure European governments to pressure their leaders into brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“Send it (the SMS) along, call it out. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE!,” Gilbert pleads in one SMS, adding, “We shouldn’t call ourselves decent Europeans if we don’t act to stop this.”
He told Swedish Radio, “This is the Warzaw ghettos of 2009,” an allusion to the NAZI offensive on the Jewish section of the Polish capital in the Second World War.
In one respect, Gilbert is very right, as Sartre was. There is no neutral position. Even ambivalence counts for something. But in another, he’s very wrong for not making his own partisan commitment clear when he speaks.
++FURTHER READING++
War 2.0: The 24/7 English news channel front
War 2.0: Israel’s post-journalism campaign in Gaza
War 2.0: Citizens, soldiers and spokesmen
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As soon as Dr. Mads Gilbert, working at the Central Hospital in Gaza deplored civilian casualties before the media, the Norwegian doctor came under dark clouds as Fox News cited Gerald Steinberg from Jerusalem, alleging Gilbert’s characterization of the situation in Gaza is “in the form of incitement of hatred.”
“He has become an apologist for Hamas, totally violating his obligation as a physician to heal the sick and not contribute to violence, ” added Steinberg.
Dr. Mads Gilbert is not alone in getting flack from many sides. In the backdrop of the claims and counter claims made about what is happening in Gaza, Avi Shlaim who in the past served in the Israeli army and is the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World writes this :
According to Shlaim who is now Oxford professor of international relations the “brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel’s objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel’s forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel’s spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.”
The following examples illustrate how the practice of dropping all the blames on the victims is now reaching hysterical proportions.
On 7 January, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, delivered the Vatican’s toughest criticism of Israel since its offensive in the Palestinian-ruled enclave, calling Gaza a “big concentration camp.” Instead of regretting the loss of innocent lives, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declared: “We are astounded to hear from a spiritual dignitary words that are so far removed from truth and dignity,” Palmor said. “The vocabulary of Hamas propaganda, coming from a member of the College of Cardinals, is a shocking and disappointing phenomenon,” he said.
As the UN Humanitarian Services complained its staff coming under fire nine times in three days, Mark Regev once again claimed that it was Hamas which was obstructing efforts by UNRWA to provide relief in Gaza. When Alex Thomson from Channel 4 News asked an Israeli government spokesman on 10 January about reports on ICRC ambulances being blocked from carrying wounded civilians, Mark Regev claimed this may have happened because of a possible presence of Hamas elements in the vicinity.
I can’t say I find Gilbert or Husum’s world views, as you present them, “troubling”, and I don’t see why Gilbert should have to append a statement of political interest to any comment he may make on the situation. As Lara has so frequently pointed out, there is no such thing as a neutral observer, and any media consumer naive enough to think there is is beyond help.
I’d hope that people who become doctors are motivated by a desire to reduce suffering, and from point of view it is hard to see how one could have a different interpretation of current events in Gaza than the one Gilbert appears to have. So I wouldn’t say he’s necessarily straying outside his medical role to point the finger of blame – Fox’s notion that the Hippocratic oath answers all moral questions for a doctor in any situation is absurd.
Of course the oppressed are usually also oppressors and vice versa – something that Fanon describes very clearly in The Wretched of the Earth (I read it in South Africa last year, and his description of the decadence of the native bourgeoisie was uncannily prescient) – and the world does not divide neatly into goodies and baddies, but right now, I think the stats speak for themselves.
The stats speak for themselves?
“Here’s a late result from the Colosseum: Lions 56, Christians nil.”
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