USA
US anti-racism campaigner criticised after claiming ‘Zionist’ doctors give ‘worse care to black and Muslim patients’
One Gaza activist hit out at Saira Rao and said Israeli doctors saved his hearing after an IDF bomb blast
January 4, 2024 12:30
One Gaza activist hit out at Saira Rao and said Israeli doctors saved his hearing after an IDF bomb blast
January 4, 2024 12:30A Gaza activist has criticised a US anti-racism campaigner who claimed that Jewish doctors give worse care to black and Muslim patients.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib spoke warmly of how Israeli doctors saved his hearing after an IDF bomb blast as he hit out at Saira Rao.
Rao was accused of antisemitism after posting on X/Twitter on Monday: “Realizing how many American doctors and nurses are Zionists and genuinely terrified for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and Black patients - even more than usual. And usually it’s bad.”
But Alkhatib, who escaped Gaza as a teenager and is now an American citizen, called Rao “hateful” as he relayed his own story.
“I have significant asymmetric hearing loss in my left ear from an IDF bombing that almost killed me in Gaza as an 11-year-old & killed two friends of mine,” he posted on X/Twitter.
“This injury still causes me complications to this day. When I came to the US from Gaza as a teenager (alone/without my family), an Israeli American neurologist whom I met through a dialogue group worked tirelessly to set me up with MRIs, CT scans, and hearing care to understand & manage my condition.
“When my dad, a former UN physician who worked in the Jabaliya refugee camp, Dr. Fouad Alkhatib, was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, an Israeli team at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem worked entirely for free for over a year to help provide medical care for his lung cancer, which unfortunately took him from our family in 2020.
Scary Zionist doctors & nurses? I have significant asymmetric hearing loss in my left ear from an IDF bombing that almost killed me in Gaza as an 11-year-old & killed two friends of mine (I’ve talked about this incident in past pieces that were published). This injury still… https://t.co/UxHczqwlxG
— Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (@afalkhatib) January 3, 2024
“Jewish & Israeli doctors are some of the kindest, loveliest, most caring people I’ve ever met.
“Even if we don’t see eye-to-eye politically, the claim that these healthcare professionals are supposedly dangerous to people of color simply because they (docs & nurses) hold different religious and political beliefs is extremely false, antisemitic, and highly offensive.
“If you actually talk to many Palestinian patients from Gaza, they’ll tell you how wrong & inaccurate this person’s hateful racism is.”
Daniel Sugarman, director of public affairs for the Board of Deputies, said: "Just say 'Jewish', Saira, this is taking forever."
Posting on X/Twitter, he continued: "There are lots of Jewish people in medicine. We're very well aware of what this sort of comment means."
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said that claims "Zionist" doctors harming patients was a tenet of antisemitism. "A call to purge dangerous 'Zionist doctors' and 'decolonise' medicine," he wrote on X/Twitter.
"Out of the slime of racist history crawls the blood libel and Stalin's anti-Jewish Doctors' Plot. Even for our times this is gross."
Rao was dropped by Creative Artists Agency in November after she posted on social media that Israelis are "genocidal ghouls" who are "obsessed with land and power and money."
Alkhatib is the founder and executive director of Project Unified Assistance, a non-profit organization working towards the establishment of a humanitarian airport in Gaza.
Rao, a former Democrat congressional candidate, founded Race2Dinner, a group that aims to "help white women confront their own racism".
After the criticism, she said on Tuesday night: “To the haters of my medical tweet, genuinely curious how the entire medical profession can be inoculated from Zionism? And why it’s unreasonable to be afraid for Muslims who have doctors who are cheering on Israel’s genocide? Lastly, the majority of Zionists are Christian.”
The JC has approached Rao for comment on Alkhatib’s remarks.