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Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
Ynetnews published the following report today on Mads Gilbert, the Norweigian propaganda doctor who appeared on a video purporting to show a resuscitation effort that bordered on farce, and who appeared in dozens of photos showing him tending to patients at a Gaza hospital - mostly children, during Operation Cast Lead.
It notes the following:
Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert entered the Gaza Strip several days before Israel launched its military offensive there. In the course of the operation Gilbert spoke to numerous media outlets, presented himself as "an objective physician" and repeatedly condemned the IDF's actions in Gaza.
However, it recently became known that Gilbert might have been less impartial than he claimed to be. The only Western doctor allowed into the Strip during the fighting is a member of the Norwegian socialist party Red, and a man who in the past expressed support for al-Qaeda's September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
That's utter nonsense. It didn't recently become known. It was known since Foxnews published that news on January 8, 2009 and made public here on this blog, Confederate Yankee, and at LGF and elsewhere from the moment that propaganda video was first published. That was nearly a month ago.
Gilbert continues giving agitprop interviews in which he claims that of the hundreds of patients he treated, only two were fighters. How exactly does he know this to be the case? After the first day of airstrikes, Hamas was not wearing uniforms and blended in with the rest of the population. Hamas hid behind womens skirts and childrens' cribs. They were indistinguishable from the rest of the population but for the mortars and rockets fired at Israel, the guns that they carried, and their use of human shields.
Bob Owens continues taking CNN and the propagandists to task for continuing to lie, obfuscate, and deny that there was ever anything wrong with the videos purporting to show doctors attempting to resuscitate a young Palestinian child.
The problems with the video are numerous, and I've outlined quite a few of them here. Bob has still more analysis.
There's no evidence suggesting that the boys were killed by gunfire or missile or rocket fire - depending on which version of events the CNN or Channel 4 propagandists come up with. You would expect to see cratering, pock marks, scorch marks, shrapnel, and other evidence that the area was fired upon. There's nothing to indicate that the damage and condition to the roof was caused by an attack in the current conflict at all. If anything, the rust stains and damage is consistent with poor construction and spalling of concrete over time exposing rebar. Damage to the galvanized roof panels is consistent not with a recent attack, but a much earlier incident of undetermined origin because damage to such panels do not rust overnight.
It's also interesting that there were quite a few photographers around to take photos of Dr. Mads Gilbert in multiple heroic poses (here, here, or here) - whether it was looking concerned at the bed of a young patient or waiting for patients at the hospital entrance. No one seems to have followed him around when supposedly attempting heroic measures to save the life of the victim portrayed in the propaganda video? No one questioned this self-described Maoist over his support for al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people. Curious. The New York Times had reporters in the same hospital, but didn't question Gilbert about his colleague's CPR techniques. Curious.
These so-called doctors are engaging in medical malpractice if they're indeed providing care to live patients. If they aren't live patients, then engaging in doing show codes for the cameras is blatant propaganda and CNN and the networks who air the video without noting it as such should be rightfully slammed for spreading lies and propaganda.
"It's absolute nonsense," Paul Martin, co-owner of World News and Features, said of accusations leveled by bloggers at videographer Ashraf Mashharawi.
"He's a man of enormous integrity and would never get involved with any sort of manipulation of images, let alone when the person dying is his own brother," Martin said. "I know the whole family. I know them very well. ... [Mashharawi] is upset and angry that anyone would think of him having done anything like this. ... This is ridiculous. He's independent."
Raafat Hamdouna, administrative director at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said Friday that "Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel. He died later in the hospital. He was treated by the Norwegian team. When he was brought in, he was breathing. The team did their best to save him. I am not really sure if they even tried to rush him to the surgery room, because he was badly hurt."
Mashharawi's video footage originally appeared on British television's Channel 4 and later on CNN. It showed futile attempts by doctors to resuscitate Mashharawi's 12-year-old brother, Mahmoud, after he and his 14-year-old cousin, Ahmed, had been wounded in what the family said was a rocket attack from a remote-controlled drone Sunday. Video
Genuine? Who carries out chest compressions as the man on the right in the video does? If you tried doing that on a person, they would die from a failure to actually get blood flowing. The lack of ventilation would mean that the person would suffer irreparable brain damage from a lack of oxygen. The efforts were futile because the doctors didn't do what the video claims they were doing - attempting to save the child's life.
The same people who are administering the hospital, treating terrorists, and whose life depends on being in Hamas' good graces are not going to honestly say anything that might result in them being treated to Hamas hospitality - thrown off a roof or executed as a collaborator with Israel as so many other Palestinians have witnessed and done.
I want to see a completely unedited version of the hospital footage as the one CNN and Channel 4 has published shows clear signs of editing and that the sequence of action may have changed.
How is it that doctors who have viewed the tape scoff that Gilbert and the other "doctor" were engaging in CPR to save the person's life, while we've got journalists and the videographer's employer saying that everything was legitimate. Whose side to take on that one?
**** CNN HAS YANKED THE VIDEO WITHOUT EXPLANATION****
This video appeared on CNN (HT: Last Mohican) and seemed fishy based on what the doctors were attempting to do. The story supposedly is that the child was injured in an Israeli airstrike by a UAV, and that the kid's brother was videotaping life in Gaza when he was summoned to the hospital to video his brother's death.
The video shows two men working over the body of a victim. One of the men giving chest compressions while the other fiddles with the monitor and appears to put EEG leads on the victim. They declare him dead.
If that was the end of the story, it would seem fishy enough, because you don't give chest compressions to the victim's abdomen as the guy on the right was doing. You also don't fiddle with a monitor that isn't hooked up to the victim although there's several rough cuts in the video so that you can't exactly tell the order of the footage.
I took infant, child, and adult CPR courses several times and they repeatedly drilled into us that you have do respiration plus 20-30 compressions (that's changed over the years), each one placed on the sternum going 1-2 inches and that if you're doing it right, you're probably going to crack ribs. The victim is 12 years old, so a two handed technique is workable, although some CPR techniques suggest using 1 hand and only compressing the chest 1 inch.
The guy giving the compressions isn't even doing it in the right position to maximize the chances for the kid to live. It almost looks like the guy is massaging the kids belly, not his chest. His hand position appears significant lower than it should be.
A high-profile Norwegian doctor who has said the September 11 terrorists were justified in their attack is now treating patients in Gaza and is being accused of presenting "hard-core propaganda" to TV interviewers in his telling of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Dr. Mads Gilbert has become an unofficial advocate of the Palestinian cause, his critics say.
International media reports, including those from the BBC, CBS, CNN and FOX’s sister station Sky News, present Gilbert as an ordinary doctor.
But a look at his record shows that Gilbert, 61, is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist "Red" party, and he has been involved in solidarity work for the Palestinians since the 1970s. He has criticized the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts.
Gilbert volunteers at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza with the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), an aid organization funded by the Norwegian government, and he has been interviewed by the media on a variety of issues. Israeli government officials have said Hamas hides weapons in the hospital where Gilbert works.
Who was really taking the video footage? Was Gilbert really treating this patient properly or was he simply engaging in propaganda for the purpose of attacking Israel? By the looks of it, I'd say that there's reason to question the medical treatment that this person received.
I think it also calls into question reports of casualties and the cause of death as reported from these Gazan facilities. I don't put it past Gilbert or anyone else operating under Hamas to honestly report causes of death or to conduct themselves honorably or morally when Hamas routinely goes through these same hospitals shooting collaborators.
OK, as a neurosurgeon (like Sanjay Gupta!) who has seen plenty of trauma, that was NOT a real resuscitation. It was not even a good fake. The doctors involved in a code, especially for a young child, are anxious and tense, and would be huddled at the bedside and looking at the child and at the monitors, not pacing around and chatting as Gilbert is doing while the bearded guy taps on the chest. Also, this is a death due to rocket trauma. Aside from a tiny round spot that looks like it came from an IV, there is no blood there, not on the sheets, not on the doctors. It was obviously not head trauma, because you see the purported victim's head later, with not a scratch; it's not exsanguination due to a traumatic amputation, since the arms and legs seem intact too. this would have been chest or abdominal trauma. What's the injury here, folks? Where are the chest tubes? Where is the blood?
And the nurse who commented above is correct, this is not what family looks like at a code. They look as though they were instructed to cry. If your child is dying in front of you, and Dr. Gilbert is pacing around, not bent over your child, you get hysterical. I know of several instances of doctors having their teeth knocked out when they came to tell a family member that a child had died, and that is here in the States.
Finally, it defies belief, even if you take the video at face value, that nobody comments on the idiocy of sending your kids to play on the roof in the middle of a war zone. No one at CNN thinks that this is peculiar?
UPDATE: CNN pulled the video without explanation, but Charles at LGF has saved it for posterity via YouTube:
The video also appears on Channel 4 News:
Both videos show signs of editing and jumping during the treatment of the victim. Channel 4's reporter is pontificating and engaging in nothing but propagandizing.
The fact is that this video has now made its way around the world courtesy of CNN and Channel 4 and the lies and smears get spread by CNN without a moment to check to see if any of this checks out.
