Useful Idiots: “Pure evil” – Dr. Mads Gilbert on Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals
Posted by t on February 16, 2024, 11:50 pm
For 30 years, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert has risked his life to give medical care to Palestinians, performing surgeries, training medical students, and supporting their renowned healthcare system. But in their most recent assault, Israel banned Dr. Gilbert from entering Gaza.
“This is the politics of elimination,” Dr. Gilbert tells us. “Israel is the only nation on Earth who has a military strategy to attack, to kill, and to dismantle civilian hospitals.”
Forced to watch the unfolding tragedy from afar, Gilbert struggles to believe the horrors he’s seeing. “It is such an avalanche of human suffering that it is almost incomprehensible. And it’s all done with full will, planning, dedication. It is a 100% man-made disaster, designed to achieve exactly the goals that they have achieved: to maim and destroy Palestinian society.”
What should have led to a huge uproar has instead been tolerated and even encouraged by Western politicians and media outlets, who have laundered false claims about militant hideouts at Palestinian hospitals.
But while the genocide of Palestinians has only just broken through to mainstream consciousness, Dr. Gilbert explains that none of this is new.
“Israel is going against absolutely every international law aimed at protecting civilian hospitals. This is unprecedented, but I’d like to add that for us who have been working with the Palestinians and their healthcare for many years, it’s not a new feature. The Israelis have always been attacking healthcare. In last year’s report from WHO, they reported 600 attacks on healthcare in the last two years.”
And in the latest assault on Gaza, there have been “hundreds and hundreds” more. “We’ve seen attacks in the West Bank where they even dress up as doctors and kill patients in their beds.”
Gilbert gives his scathing post-mortem: “This is a historical low point in human history. This enormous collapse of western morality and principles. We’re back to the jungle.”
Hear the full, unpaywalled interview with Mads Gilbert, and listen to the end for his message on how to help. “We can all do our part: write a poem, sing a song, participate in a demonstration, write a letter to your politician. Take part in history because we need to change history now.”
He finishes, solemnly: “What you are doing now, or what you are not doing now, is what you would have done, or not done, during the Holocaust.”
Re: Useful Idiots: “Pure evil” – Dr. Mads Gilbert on Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals
The near total moral collapse - political, economic and social - in our leadership and elite, whether politicians, media, corporate business will have repercussions, there is a blood debt to pay and we will ultimately have to pay it. Whether it will be social upheaval or war coming to us, or both, I don't know, both are vying hard to disrupt our careless hubris. It may not be that far off.
Thx, remember Mads from Cast Lead days, excellent human being (nm)
Found it, Pilger quoted him in one of his articles. It stuck with me for the bravery of defending the Palestinian right to resistance, including armed resistance, drawing the parallel with the Norwegian resistance against Nazi occupation in WW2:
Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work in Gaza. On 8 August, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tromso in Norway which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years. He said, "Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the fish in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals, our ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.
"Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not! And this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between terrorism and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting. Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian people's will to resist. It is the Palestinian people's dignity that they will not accept this.
"In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews Untermenschen - subhuman. Today, Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered without any in power reacting.
"So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is free because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have the right to resist, even with weapons - it's stated in international law. And the Palestinian people's resistance in Gaza is admirable: a struggle for us all."Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
I see. Thanks for digging that up .. good memory : )