Anti-Semitism has infected the NHS

Britain’s National Health Service has become a hotbed of anti-Semitism. It seems nearly every week brings a new case of an NHS doctor expressing foul views about Jews. Worse, these views seem to be expressed with impunity. The problem is now so serious that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, has vowed to overhaul the UK’s medical regulator to ‘root out the evil of racism’ from the NHS.

A report in The Times cites the case of Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee doctor from Manchester. In September, she faced the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service (MPTS) for describing the Royal Free Hospital in north London as a ‘Jewish supremacy cesspit’. She also said that the Holocaust was a ‘fabricated victim narrative’ and described the terrorists who carried out the 7 October 2023 pogrom as ‘martyrs’ who were repelling ‘foreign Jews’. According to The Times, she was even filmed making a ‘throat-slit gesture’ towards a group of Jews.

Shockingly, the MPTS didn’t see what the fuss was all about. It dismissed the complaint made by the General Medical Council (GMC) against Aladwan, declaring her fit to practise because she posed no ‘real risk to patients’. Her lawyer successfully argued that, as a Palestinian and ‘direct victim of genocide and dispossession’, she was merely ‘exercising her freedom of speech to oppose crimes by Israel, including those identified by the UN’. She was the real victim here, in other words.

This was a bridge too far for Streeting. In response to the MPTS’s decision, he promised to overhaul the GMC, which he said he had ‘no faith’ in. Alarmingly, he added that medical regulators are ‘completely failing to protect Jewish patients’. His most significant proposal so far has been to make sure that doctors accused of misconduct are stripped of their right to practise while under investigation. At Streeting’s instance, Aladwan will face another hearing at the MPTS later this month.

Indeed, it may be shaping up to be a busy few months for the medical tribunal. That is because Aladwan is far from alone: there have been more than 500 complaints of anti-Semitism, made against 123 separate doctors, since 7 October 2023.

One case that stands out amid this vast catalogue of hatred is that of Manoj Sen, who until recently was a surgeon at Northwick Park Hospital in north London. In a series of social-media posts, Sen referred to a Jewish man as ‘Jew boy’, ‘circumcised vermin’ and ‘Untermenschen’ – a phrase used extensively by the Nazis, meaning subhuman. Sen’s defence – that alcoholism was to blame for his ‘injudicious’ statements – was to no avail, and he was struck from the medical register last month. Evidently, there are limits to playing the victim card. Even at the MPTS.

It gets worse. Ellen Kriesels, a consultant paediatrician at London’s Whittington Hospital, was due to treat a disabled Jewish child in June last year. However, the young boy’s family objected to the doctor’s pro-Palestinian lanyard. Further investigation of her beliefs – boastfully articulated on her public X account – revealed what can only be described as a profoundly disturbed mind. On X, Kriesels said that ‘virtually every Jew has some feelings of supremacy’, which she attributed to their ‘Zionist upbringing’. She opined that ‘secular Jews are very much part of all this evil and they certainly have feelings of supremacy’. ‘World Jewry’, she claimed, had been ‘complicit or silent’ in the ‘slaughtering [of] Palestinians’.

What happened next was sickening. The child, who had cerebral palsy and other serious conditions, was supposed to have been referred to specialist treatment at University College London Hospitals Trust. He wasn’t. During their son’s annual medical review, the parents were told that the referral should have been made by Kriesels. The family has claimed that her conduct breached the regulations on good medical care.

What’s striking about these cases isn’t just that NHS doctors hold such warped beliefs. It is also that they barely bother to conceal them beneath the respectable cloak of ‘anti-Zionism’ or being ‘pro-Palestine’. Instead, they go straight for the big kahunas: ‘World Jewry’, ‘Jewish supremacy cesspits’ and ‘subhuman’ Jews. And they say these things on their public social-media profiles, for all the world to see. They clearly feel emboldened, both by the wider climate of Jew hatred and by the medical establishment’s apparent unwillingness to push back.

Thankfully, the UK’s political leadership is starting to take an interest in this crisis. On Thursday, prime minister Keir Starmer announced a review into NHS anti-Semitism and promised that all 1.5million NHS staff will now have to undergo ‘training’. Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on anti-Semitism, has also promised a ‘rapid review’ into how health regulators allowed anti-Semitism to spread across hospitals in the UK.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these promises will translate into any effective action. We have heard the platitudes about ‘standing up to hate’ from Starmer and Co many times before. It will take more than warm words to wipe away the stain of anti-Semitism, in the NHS and beyond.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.