Sir, – While the heartache engendered by the recent terrorist atrocity at Tapuah Junction is still deeply felt, I would like to question some of the axioms and assumptions that appear to form the basis of “Hospitals must treat terrorists, too” by Dr. Avraham Rivkind and Marcie Natan (Comment & Features, May 1).
“The courageous specialists” at the hospital in Boston “kept a suspected terrorist alive because it was the right thing to do,” Rivkind and Natan assure us.
They indeed state that this doctrine is imbedded in the very oath taken by aspiring physicians, and that “they do so without any qualification of their future patients’ nationality, ethnicity, religion, financial status – or even terrorist background.”
The authors are unhesitant. “All human beings deserve medical attention,” they say.
It is to the very core of this matter that I would like to invite perhaps the rethinking and consideration of caring and sensitive people.
Into the long and ugly history of man’s ill-treatment of his fellow man, the Nazis and modern terrorists introduced a new and unique relationship between a murderer and his victim. This really could be defined as a total nonrelationship.
Modern terror is built on the total innocence of the victim and the absence of any motive related to his individuality.
This murderer does not act out of passion against the victim, nor does he seek revenge or hope to gain from his death. His sole mission, goal and purpose is the very destruction of life itself.
The question I feel must be raised is as follows: When do the extreme heinous actions of a person declare him no longer able to justify his right to bear the title “human being?” Does not this title require a minimal essence of ethical and moral behavior? When do the actions of a person require that he be expelled from this club? When do his actions declare that he has abdicated his membership? When faced with a culture of death doing battle with the forces of life, what is to be our reaction?
ZEV CHAMUDOT
Petah Tikva
[Image credit: Ninian Reid]
