Right after Simchas Torah 5784, when she and her husband were able to read and hear details of the Hamas attack on Israel, surgeon Dr. Josh Winer’s wife asked him simply, “When are you leaving?” Although it was 20 years since his initial service in the IDF as a lone soldier, she knew where he would be heading.
He took leave as a physician (rated by 154 patients at 4.9 points out of 5) and professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta and flew to Israel to serve as a doctor in an IDF reconnaissance unit in Gaza, where he provided medical care to wounded soldiers.
When he returned to Emory, he encountered, as he put it, “hostility” from some at the college.
Among the hostile was one Umaymah Mohammad, an Emory student, who accused Dr. Winer of war crimes and genocide. She sent an email to the entire medical school with the subject: “Palestinian blood stains your hands, Emory University and School of Medicine.” She made her accusations on an Internet news program, in an op-ed, on a podcast hosted by the International Union of Scientists and at a press conference.
As a result of her statements about Dr. Winer, his profaner was suspended from the university in November 2024 for one year. Now, blessedly, she also faces a lawsuit for her slander.
Other defendants in the suit are CAIR Georgia, CAIR National, Doctors Against Genocide Society, National Students for Justice in Palestine and Emory Students for Justice in Palestine—groups that published and endorsed the student’s claims.
Ever alert to an opportunity to promote “intersectionality,” Emory SJP created social media posts declaring that Dr. Winer was a threat to students and patients of color. That many IDF soldiers, likely including some of those he rushed to treat, are of Sefardi or African ethnicity was somehow overlooked.
The lawsuit argues that Ms. Mohammad’s statements constitute defamation because they were made with malice and caused professional damage to Dr. Winer, who claims that his reputation was sullied by his being labeled an abettor of genocide and a danger to people with dark skin. The lawsuit was filed in a US district court in Atlanta on April 25. The defendants have not yet responded.
Ms. Mohammad has her supporters, needless to say. Their mindlessness is matched only by their maliciousness.
One is Rupa Marya, a doctor and musician based in San Francisco and the co-author of the revealingly loony-titled “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.”
In an article with a similarly revealing title—“Moving From Colonial to Liberation Medicine in a Time of Genocide”—Dr. Marya celebrates Ms. Mohammad as someone “whose courage shines as she shares her horror that a professor at Emory went to serve a combat unit during the genocide and came back as if everything was perfectly normal.”
She goes on to declare, as did her hero, that “Dr. Josh Winer at Emory University is not fit for teaching medical students in a pluralistic society, especially not ones whose family is currently being annihilated by Israel.”
One has to wonder if it occurred to her, or to her clay-footed idol, for even a moment, that Israel routinely cares for wounded Arab combatants. Or that, were the slanderers of Dr. Winer themselves to summon the courage to travel to Gaza to treat the wounded, they would not likely be hounded as supporters of what is truly genocidal terrorism. Or that, were they to channel their indignation and energies toward pressing Hamas to release those they kidnapped and lay down their weapons like Japan and Germany did in 1945, the “genocide” (i.e., war of survival) would immediately end.
Nah. It’s easier and more satisfying to just lament, as Dr. Marya does, that “Umaymah was suspended for speaking up about this violation of her safety and civil rights” and to bemoan “a colonial medical system that supports genocidal physicians.”
The lawsuit against Ms. Mohammad et al is important, as its success might (well, not likely, but still) discourage the sort of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity that has pustulated in the medical field, like some private online forums for American Academy of Pediatrics members. One of that group’s leaders posted that “We pray for the disappearance of Zionism and Israel” and lauded disgraced (though still popular) conspiracy theory promoter and hater Candace Owens.
For our part, we pray for the disappearance of what has been called “the eternal hatred,” which has presented itself in different guises over the centuries. And persists today, scowling and wearing a keffiyeh.
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