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NHS doctor targeted by Israel lobby says “the death threats are worse than ever”

Rahmeh Aladwan is a British-Palestinian doctor in the NHS. She has been “withstanding a two-year long coordinated assault campaign by the UK ‘Israel’ lobby for standing against the Holocaust in Palestine”. And on 13 October, she said:

The death threats are worse than ever. I have had to call the police for the second time this year to protect my family.

She added that the lobby’s campaign, which pro-Israel health secretary Wes Streeting has backed, “is political violence”. And she stressed:

You have painted a target on an innocent NHS doctor’s back.

Also on 13 October, activist and independent journalist Ani Says issued a worrying video about the situation on Instagram:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ani Says (@ani.says2)

Aladwan has also insisted that her harassment represents something much bigger – the state’s crackdown on free speech and the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”:

Persecution in service of genocidal colonialism

We don’t need to agree with all the opinions someone holds, or the way they express them, to support their right to free speech. Rahmeh Aladwan, for example, has been very outspoken in ways that some supporters of Palestinian liberation may disagree with. But as her crowdfunder says, Palestinian people have just experienced two years:

of genocide, of heartbreak, of constantly losing loved ones

Anyone who is not full of indignation at this point has not been paying attention.

But for Aladwan, these two years have also been a period of:

doxxing, smears, defamation, threats, and harassment from the UK ‘israel’ lobby and jewish supremacists (zionists).

She has defended herself against the claims of the lobbyists targeting her livelihood by stressing that the main issue is her opposition to:

genocide caused by jewish supremacy, extremism, and unadulterated terrorism.

Who we should be condemning: Rahmeh Aladwan is right

Rahmeh Aladwan has consistently refused to condemn Hamas or its actions, insisting that Israeli colonialism is the root cause of Palestinians’ resistance.

And it’s true that Hamas is not the organisation behind a brutal, decades-long colonial occupation. Nor has it murdered over 20,000 children in the last two years. Palestinian people, meanwhile, very much have the legal right to resist occupation, but Israel does not have the legal right to decimate a territory it occupies. For these reasons and more, the UK’s illogical stance on Israel’s colonial regime in Palestine has sparked challenges to the UK’s proscription of Hamas.

Pointing this out, however, doesn’t mean Hamas is a progressive champion. Because it’s not. But its crimes pale in comparison to those of the genocidal apartheid state it’s resisting. And the groups going after Aladwan are attacking free speech in Britain because of their support for that state.

On Wednesday 15 October, there will be a protest in London against British state censorship on behalf of Israeli war criminals. And anyone who truly cares about free speech should support it.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.