NRK journalist Øyvor Bakke hosts the program ”Middagselskapet” (The Dinner Party), where the guest is invited to present three people he or she would have liked to invite to a dinner party. On April 9th the guest of the evening was Mads Gilbert, a maoist physician who became famous when he covered the 2009/2010 war between Hamas and Israel from the safe spot of Shifa hospital, where Gilbert served as a NORWAC doctor and which Hamas fighters used as a base. See the clip on NRK.
Mr.Gilbert’s imaginary guests turned out to be Charlie Chaplin, Author of “The elegance of the Hedgehog” Muriel Barbery and Abu Jihad, who masterminded the worst terrorist act in Israel’s history in which 37 civilians were murdered in a bus hijacking led by Dalal Mughrabi in 1978. Program host Øyvor Bakke does not bat an eyelid at Gilbert’s dream-cast of guests, but introduces Abu Jihad to her audience with the words: “Next man out is what must say is… a powerful man…”
The following then ensues:
Øyvor Bakke: Abu Jihad as he is also known is a powerful political figure…
Mads Gilbert: Yes, and I would love to invite him… and it might as well have been a woman from the Palestinian liberation movement or from one of the other liberation struggles in the third world, against occupation, against colonization. Abu Jihad was a special person in the Palestinian struggle, he was a great teacher, a philosopher, he was an analyst, he was very knowledgeable about language, culture, and so forth, knew the Palestinian history inside out, and many Palestinians still say today that if Abu Jihad had been alive we would have had a different situation. He was liquidated by the Israelis in 1988 in Tripoli. The Israelis call him a terrorist, and that brings us into the interesting discussion, the liberator of one is the terrorist on another. The Palestinians say that the Israelis are the terrorists, while the Israelis say that it is the Palestinians who are the terrorists…
Øyvor Bakke: Is it true that you have met with him?
Mads Gilbert: I met Abu Jihad in Lebanon in 1981, while we were there with the first surgical team from the Palestine Committee… it was a significant meeting.
Øyvor Bakke: What was he like?
Mads Gilbert: The silent type, wise, very dignified, very.. in many ways a representative for the Arab culture but also for Palestinian pride… a listener, and at the same time an inexhaustible source of knowledge, so I learned a lot from that, it was not a long meeting, a couple of hours, but it was… it stuck.
Abu Jihad was, of course, the person behind the Savoy Hotel murder of 8 Israeli civilians and the Coastal Road Massacre where 35 civilians were killed.
Gilbert has been on the record for supporting terrorism for a long time, however. After 9/11, he told a Norwegian newspaper that he would have supported the attacks as a legitimate reaction to US actions in the Middle East.
Zvi adds:
And yet he gets face time in he media to fabricate blood libels about Israel, with nobody mentioning his long-time worship of - and collaboration with - people who live to slaughter civilians. He was responsible for making the claim that among Gazan casualties, women and children comprised 25% of the dead and 45% of the wounded. [He also said that over 90% were civilians. - EoZ]
A doctor who is a radical extremist who knowingly encourages terrorist attacks against innocent civilians must NOT be granted automatic credibility in the press. When someone like Gilbert is used as a supposedly professional "witness for the prosecution," the press has an absolute responsibility to identify their prior sociopathic statements, their prior demands that doctors practice politics during conflicts (rather than focusing on life-saving and truth), and their claims that medicine is mostly politics. Politicians are judged in an entirely different light than doctors. The press has a responsibility to identify someone who begs to be judged as a politician.
Radovan Karadzic was a psychiatrist before he becae a mass murderer and war criminal. Josef Mengele was a doctor. Just because someone is a doctor does not mean that they are professionals who are above lying, or that they have any moral authority whatsoever.When Gilbert was subsequently criticized as a propagandist and politician by journalists, Norwegian FM Store has come to Gilbert's defense. This says a lot about Store and the Norwegian government as a whole.