AMHP Statement on Involvement
of Doctors
The
Association for Muslim Health Professionals has issued a
statement about the events unfolding in the United Kingdom.
It states: It is with a heavy heart that we read about the
affair in the United Kingdom. As we consider these events,
we hope to remind ourselves and our peers in the health
and the Muslim communities of several things:
We have faith in the British system of justice and hope
and expect that all suspects will have a fair trial, without
prejudice. These acts in the UK, if found to be truly done
by health professionals, are inconsistent with all we believe
in as Americans, as health professionals, and as Muslims.
We call on all people of conscience, whether they be health
professionals, Muslims, Americans, or British to consider
seriously the damage their actions might cause to innocent
people, the societies who would suffer from their actions,
and the peoples and groups whom they will be labeled to
represent when caught and identified.
If found to be guilty, these men will not be the first doctors
to plan or perform heinous acts. If British justice system
finds them guilty of these crimes, we put them in a pantheon
of heinous physicians performing acts that go against the
grain of all we believe in as Muslim health professionals.
Josef Mengele, Mike Swango, Harold Shipman, and in the UK,
John B Adams are small list of psychopaths with medical
degrees who have harmed countless numbers of people in defiance
of their professional oaths. We make no difference between
health professionals who use their skills contrary to the
human rights of any individual. Whether it is serial murder
or genocide, medical torture for the military, or unethical
research for profit, these people are not from us and
we are not from them
We especially call on all health professionals, from all
ethnic and minority communities, to look for signs of social
isolation within their community, and to openly discuss
the issues of terrorism, vigilantism, and violence that
have become a cancer in our midst.
Indeed, we remind all health practitioners of their obligations
under the Geneva Convention, which ask that we state that
"[I, the medical practitioner] will maintain the utmost
respect for human life from its beginning even under threat
and I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the
laws of humanity.”
The Association for Muslim Health Professionals, founded
in 2004, seeks to become a leader in improving public health,
through methods inspired by Islamic tradition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
