That the UK medical journal The Lancet has been hijacked in the pursuit of an anti-Israel campaigning agenda is certainly not news judging by the regularity that the publication has been critiqued by HonestReporting.
In 2010, the journal employed active supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel as supposedly expert commentators on the situation, which earned it a 2010 Dishonest Reporter Award. Lancet editor Richard Horton even posted a snide response aimed at HonestReporting. A further examination in 2013 revealed more anti-Israel bias. So, in August, in the midst of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, The Lancet’s publication of an “open letter for the people in Gaza” came as no surprise. That radical Israel hater and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Mads Gilbert was one of the signatories was enough to signal just how politicized the letter was.
The Daily Telegraph has, however, revealed far more about some of the signatories thanks to some research by NGO Monitor:
In addition, a cache of emails openly available in Google groups show that two of the authors, Dr Paola Manduca and Dr Swee Ang, have sympathies with the views of David Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.
Dr Swee Ang, an orthopaedic surgeon, and Dr Manduca, a professor of genetics at the University of Genoa in Italy – who are both members of pro-Palestine NGOs – sent round-robin emails to their contacts promoting a video entitled “CNNGoldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix”.
The video features an extended anti-Semitic rant by Duke, in which he claims that “the Zionist Matrix of Power controls Media, Politics and Banking” and that “some of the Jewish elite practices racism and tribalism to advance their supremacist agenda”.
Dr Ang wrote: “This is a shocking video please watch. This is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!”
In another email, Dr Manduca forwarded a message alleging that the Boston marathon bombings were in fact carried out by Jews. “Let us hope that someone in the FBI us smart enough to look more carefully at the clues in Boston and find the real culprits behind these bombings instead of buying the Zionist spin”, it said.
And The Lancet’s reaction to be informed of this?
“It’s utterly irrelevant. It’s a smear campaign,” the editor of the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, told the Daily Telegraph. “I don’t honestly see what all this has to do with the Gaza letter. I have no plans to retract the letter, and I would not retract the letter even if it was found to be substantiated.”
So the trampling of medical ethics, professionalism and credibility continues at The Lancet, whose anti-Israel obsession appears to be terminal and incurable.
