Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert is a familiar face to anyone who has covered Israel’s military operations in Gaza going back to Operation Cast Lead in 2008/09.
Time and time again, however, Gilbert has been exposed by HonestReporting and others as a radical Marxist anti-Israel propagandist rather than a credible and objective medical practitioner. Yet he continues to appear in the international media and is even credited as a source in the UN’s report into the 2014 Gaza conflict.
Now, Mad Mads has published a book. Unsurprisingly, The Guardian runs a full-length feature on Gilbert, even promoting the book on its Guardian Bookshop service.
According to the article:
The book contains dozens of harrowing photographs, many of badly injured children, taken by Gilbert during his stay in Gaza last summer, although the most graphic were excluded. He describes his camera as “my Kalashnikov”, saying that this kind of medical documentation of war is a powerful weapon – and one that is feared by Israel.
Considering the Kalashnikov or AK-47 is the weapon of choice for terror groups and dictatorial regimes the world over, this hardly comes as a surprise. As NGO Monitor has noted about Gilbert:
Dr. Gilbert is a former member of the fringe left Red Party in Norway, which has its roots in the country’s Communist Party. Gilbert stood as the Red Party’s candidate in local elections in the town of Tromsoe in 2007.
In addition, the centrality of his ideology was highlighted in comments following Al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on USA on September 11, 2001, in which Dr Gilbert expressed sympathy with the terrorists. Days after the atrocity, in an interview for the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet Gilbert said “The attack on New York did not come as a surprise after the policy that the West has led during the last decades…The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with.” When asked directly in the same interview, “Do you support a terror attack against the USA?,” Gilbert replied, “Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes within the context which I have mentioned.”
Indeed, in The Guardian’s article, Gilbert effectively states his support for terrorism:
These people [the Palestinians] have the right to defend themselves, the right to resist. The right to resist implies also the right to resist with arms, if you’re occupied.
The Guardian also writes:
He [Gilbert] also rejects claims by the Israeli government that the Shifa was used as a base by Hamas officials and militants in the knowledge that Israel would not attack the hospital. Gilbert points out that a number of hospitals and medical facilities were in fact shelled by Israel during last summer’s war, and that Hamas won free and fair elections in 2006: “I have never seen any activities in the Shifa that would violate the Geneva conventions. But I didn’t explore every corner of the large hospital compound. If I saw anything inside the Shifa that in my opinion violated the Geneva conventions and, should I say, the ‘holiness’ of a hospital, I would have left.”
It’s already documented that Hamas used Shifa for launching rockets, headquarters, and as a media center. Willful blindness on the part of Gilbert as to what was going on right under his nose? Or something far more sinister? As NGO Monitor also notes about Gilbert during Operation Cast Lead in 2008/09:
During the fighting and afterward, Gilbert repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians and invented allegations of use of illegal weapons, while making no mention of evidence that Al-Shifa hospital had been used for military purposes and also shielded the Hamas leadership. There is also evidence that he helped stage emergency room scenes for a “propaganda effect.”
Time and again we ask the question as to why mainstream media outlets continue to rely on Mads Gilbert, a radical Marxist anti-Israel propagandist, for comment. Based on The Guardian’s ideological antagonism towards Israel, in this case, the answer to the question is blindingly obvious.
Featured images: CC BY Bjarne Thune via Wikimedia Commons & CC BY Brage Aronsen (rødt.no) via Flickr
