Maybe We Don't Have It So Bad
I don't usually relate world stories, but since access to health care has been such a bubbly issue in Illinois this past year, this Newsweek story caught my eye.
Doctors in the Cross Hairs details how insurgents in Iraq have been targeting doctors with violence in order to dissuade them from practicing medicine in the occupied territory.
There's so much meat in the story, it's tough to pick out excerpts. But the lead is good:
Abu Mohammed can't go near a hospital now. The Iraqi bone specialist, 37, has lived in fear since August, when his younger brother, also a doctor, was shot dead one night while walking home from his clinic in Baghdad. Abu Mohammed bought a pistol after that, but he still doesn't feel safe. Recently he was offered a managerial job at one of the city's biggest hospitals. He's scared to accept it. His wife owned a pharmacy; she sold it in November. A week or so ago a doctor friend of theirs was kidnapped from his clinic in the city's Mansour district—the latest of their friends to vanish. "My brother was killed when the terrorists started a campaign against doctors," says Abu Mohammed. "He was one of their victims."or this closer:
Kind of puts all of the hyperbole about how doctors are being driven out of Illinois into perspective, doesn't it?
the insurgents are attacking the social structure wherever its defenses are weakest, aiming to create chaos so hopeless that America will finally give up and go home. Now they are targeting the health-care system with murders, kidnappings and scare tactics. According to the Iraqi Doctors Association, at least 65 physicians were killed in 2005—more than double the total for either of the previous two years—while others were kidnapped or threatened with death. Hundreds have fled the country.
13 comments:
no, not at all
Journalist were targeted by Islamic Terrorists a few months ago. Here is a statement found on Labor Friends of Iraq by the International Federation of Journalists on the murder of Mohammad Harun Hassan --editor and the Executive Secretary of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate.
Finally, a letter published a few days ago in The Guardian,
As a London-based Iraqi currently visiting family and friends all over Iraq, I cannot help but notice the sense of hope surging through this devastated country. The Iraqi people have been summoned to the ballot three times within one year and on all three occasions have responded in their masses, all eager to have a say in the new democratic Iraq. It's a shame, therefore, that despite the optimism within Iraq, the western media continues to portray the situation in Iraq in a negative light - particularly the recent elections.
We should not forget that the concept of democracy is new to the people of Iraq, who have had to endure more than two decades of brutal dictatorship. So the fact many voted on sectarian lines is hardly surprising, nor was it unexpected. The allegations of fraud have also been overblown. The UN representative in Iraq has described the elections as one of the most transparent to be held in the Middle East. Even with the votes under scrutiny for fraud, the final results will remain unaffected.
After three defeats at the ballot box, the Sunnis must now realise that the era when the minority ruled over the majority has passed. That the United Iraqi Alliance, the clear victor of this election, is already beginning negotiations to form a government of national unity that will include Arab Sunnis, Kurds and Turkoman is another positive sign: in the new democratic Iraq, all will share in the building of a bright future.
With every vote cast, Iraqis continue to defy the terrorists who fear a democratic Iraq. Try as they might, the terrorists will not win over the resilience of the Iraqi people as a whole.
Ahmed Alaskary
London
As Bill Ayers said, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing and as Mr Alaskary writes, it's blowing our way.
The only question left to ask is the one from the old United Mine Workers song,
Which side are you on boy,
Which side are you on
So which side are you on?
One more, then I'll quit. An Obit in yesterday's Wash Post for Staff Sgt. Ayman Taha, age 31
His father described him as a devout Muslim who believed that "the message of Islam is very simple . . . to believe in God and do good deeds."
Ayman Taha, born in Sudan, was also a member of the US Army special forces who gave up a promising academic career three years ago to enlist. He was sent to Iraq a year ago and was killed last Friday while preparing a munitions cache for demolition.
Again according to his father:
"He strongly agreed that what they were doing is good and that they were helping people in the Middle East to get out of the . . . historic bottleneck" that had confined them.
via Harry's Place
I'd like to think I'm with this guy. I'm trying like hell to get over and help.
Yellow Dog,
This post is in very poor taste.
If bloggers were sued at the rate of metro-east doctors, you would feel very differently about the issue of legal reform.
Yeah, they just blew up another 200 people there in the last day. The war is a complete disaster.
Yellow Dog, point taken indeed. But let's not get too carried away, it's not there aren't plenty of issues being pushed by Democrats that are rife with hyperbole or in need of proper perspective.
This kind of reminds me of how I felt about the stupid War on Christmas debate. While the issue was completely silly, I still take a lot of comfort in the fact that here in America, the most prominent religious arguments are just a back and forth on talk shows over what is the proper holiday greetings, which is a lot better than the religious arguments they're having in Iraq, which involve Sunnis and Shiites blowing up each other's mosques and killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process.
Allan -
For all I know, bloggers are being sued as much as Metro-East doctors.
According to news reports, there have only been two verdicts against doctors in Madison and St. Clair counties over the past eleven years.
Pat -
Good post. Even though I think public school teachers are underpaid, I know they still earn more than their parochial school counterparts.
And even though the premiums Illinois doctors are being charged are outrageous, according to Medical Economics Magazine, docs still have the highest take home pay in the land -- the average nuerosurgeon takes home about $400K a year (after expenses), and up in Chicago they reportedly take home a cool million.
GOP -
My old nemesis and friend. I don't deny my party can use a reality check every once in awhile.
Exhibit A: the minimum wage. Yes, the minimum wage is stagnant in America, and it should be the goal of a just and civil society to reward an honest day's work with an honest day's pay.
But let's not forget that half the world's population (3.3 billion) lives on less than $2 a day, and half those live on less than $1 a day.
Of course, once you remember this, it's easy to understand why "free" trade is such a losing proposition for America, and why, with a little help from Wal-Mart, our trade deficit with China grew to $200 billion this year, a new record.
65 physicians killed in one year.
AP reports that 76 journalists were killed in Iraq since March 2003.
Cal -
No doubt, being a journalist in Iraq is a dangerous job.
I'd be careful about comparing the two, though.
First some journalists are dying because the job of trying to get the story is, by its very nature, dangerous. Others are being killed to make a political statement.
Iraqi doctors are being targeted for a different reason -- to keep them from doing their jobs, just as truck drivers are being killed to keep them from delivering oil. It is a shrewd and apparently effective effort to destabilize the country.
Say what you want about the guerrillas, they know how to find the soft spot.
By the way, according to one expert, 1001 is the number of Iraqis (military and civilian) killed under the occupation each month in Bagdad alone, an estimated 4,000 each month in the entire country. I'd say we're doing a lousy job of providing security there.
What's your response to an apparently effective effort Yellow dog: give up and surrender?
'cause that sure seems like what you're suggesting here with this post.
Check the Belmont Club,
The Washington Post recently wrote a somewhat disparaging article of bloggers on the battlefield, mentioning Bill Roggio in particular. I hadn't realized that a blogger -- and not a regular Western professional correspondent -- was the only foreign journalist to die in Iraq in 2005.
Post a Comment