**UPDATE** Wiesenthal Centre to World Medical Association: “Resist Pressure to Expel Israel from World Medical Association (WMA)”

January 25, 2016

**UPDATE**

WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION RESPONDS FAVORABLY TO LETTER FROM SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER
Read letter here

Read related stories:

 • The Forward:
BDS Push to Have Israel Expelled From World Medical Association Fails

 • Jerusalem Post:
World Medical Association affirms trust in Israeli doctors in response to BDS campaign

• The Times of Israel
World medical body will not expel Israel

SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE-EUROPE

Tel.: +33(0)1 47 23 76 37
Fax: +33(0)1 47 20 84 01
Email:csweurope@gmail.com


“It is ironic that the WMA ethical programme was born in the wake of World War II, when Nazi doctors committed inhuman experiments on children, exterminated the handicapped and murdered six million Jews and others.”

“The prejudices of seventy one British doctors bent on Israel's expulsion have turned them into ethics abortionists.”

Paris, 21 January 2016

In a letter to World Medical Association (WMA), President, Sir Michael Marmot, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, expressed horror that “the very mission of the World Medical Association (WMA) ethics programme is about to be impugned by a group of 71 British physicians intent on expelling the Israel Medical Association from your membership.”

Samuels noted, “it is indeed ironic that your history highlights the birth of the WMA in the wake of the Second World War... Medical ethics had been trashed as Nazi doctors and nurses committed inhuman experiments on children, exterminated the handicapped and murdered over six million Jews and countless others.”

The letter viewed it as “inconceivable to discriminate against the State of the Jewish victims and survivors,” asking, “on what grounds?”, arguing that “any unannounced visit to the hospitals of Israel – and especially Hadassah in Jerusalem – will show Arab doctors treating Jewish children and Jewish medical teams administering to
Arab patients from across the Middle East, even from countries intent upon their destruction.”

Samuels stressed, “those same teams have served survivors of national catastrophes from Haiti to Turkey and regularly hold training programmes in Africa and Asia, even in states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel.”

The letter emphasized that, “Israeli medical research and development produces drugs without borders in the truest ethical spirit of the Hippocratic oath.”

The Centre urged the President, “to resist attempts to distort the WMA purpose. The late Simon Wiesenthal's axiom was “what starts with the Jews never ends with them.” Any expulsion would clearly damage the targetted national member association. Harming Israeli physicians would also damage their Palestinian colleagues and patients.”

“Perhaps this is the aim of the 71 doctors whose prejudices turn them into ethics abortionists,” concluded Samuels.

For further information please contact Shimon Samuels 00 33 609 770 158, join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter page or mobile device.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).