Antisemitic doctor fired for saying she’d ‘give all Jews wrong medicines’

An antisemitic doctor in the United States has been fired after old tweets were unearthed showing her threatening to give Jewish patients the wrong medication.

An apology from Dr Lara Kollab, 27, didn’t save her job at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which confirmed that she no longer worked there on Monday morning, but Jewish groups said the state should now strip her of her medical licence.

The recent graduate caused outrage after tweets from 2012 and 2013 were published showing her threatening to “purposely give all the yahood the wrong meds”. She also said Jews were “dogs” and hoped “Allah will kill the Jews”.

In a belated attempt to rectify the situation, the medic, who is of Palestinian heritage, issued a public statement saying she “sincerely and unequivocally” apologised, saying she had been motivated by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

“I visited Israel and the Palestinian Territories every summer throughout my adolescent years. I became incensed at the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation,” she wrote.

“The injustice and brutality of the occupation continues to concern me… Like many young people lacking life experience, I expressed myself by making insensitive remarks and statements of passion devoid of thought, not realizing the harm and offense these words would cause.”

She added that her comments, unearthed by online antisemitism monitor Canary Mission, “were made years before I was accepted into medical school, when I was a naïve and impressionable girl barely out of high school,” adding: “Those words do not represent who I am today.”

All physicians take the 2,500-year old Hippocratic Oath, in which they swear to treat the ill to the best of their ability and to uphold professional ethical standards.

A letter has been lodged with the Ohio State Board of Medical Examiners calling for Kollab’s licence to be withdrawn before it expires in 2021, with support from organisations such as the Zionist Organisation of America.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Medical Ethics Division at the NYU School of Medicine, said: “You can probably be online with all kinds of political views, even hateful views, but the line you can’t cross is threatening to mistreat or commit malpractice against a patient. That should cost her license.”