The letter in your 21 April edition, calling for a boycott of the Israeli Medical Association, is a regurgitation of defamatory charges already dismissed by the British Medical Association in the BM Journal of September 2003.

The very same propagandists ignore film footage of Palestinian ambulances transporting suicide bomb-belts, ostensible invalids with firearms attacking Israeli border police at checkpoints, the numerous Palestinian patients treated at Israeli hospitals alongside Jews in the care of Palestinian doctors. Clearly irrelevant is the embrace of Palestinian women cancer victims by their Israeli sister sufferers at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem which is perhaps the most evocative plea for peace.

False accusations of Israeli violations of medical ethics are made to draw attention away from such barbaric "medical practices" in Palestine as female genital mutilation and uvulectomy as a treatment for mental sickness. Needless to say, mention of beaten wives and women victims of "honour" killings is a politically incorrect taboo.

Why are these British doctors not spouting their "hypocritic oath" from Gaza or the West Bank? Perhaps due to the mass flight of Westerners from the Hamas reign of terror and culture of death, where even sympathizers are indiscriminately kidnapped?

The instigators of this Israel-bashing campaign include several psychiatrists. This, indeed, may be the indicated therapy to treat these serial boycotters' obsessive-compulsive disorder regarding the Jewish State.

I would prescribe that they seek a second opinion in Israel.

Yours faithfully,

Dr Shimon Samuels
Director for International Relations
Simon Wiesenthal Centre
64 avenue Marceau
75008 Paris, France