Israel's humanity revealed in Haiti; Who has been misleading us about the Israeli nature?

By emerging out from under the distorting reporters of the Middle-East news industry, the IDF's (Israel Defense Forces) true colors are finally being seen with clarity. The integrity which US reporters observed by the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti shows makes one wonder: who has effectively tainted the world's perception of Israel's ethics for so long? (Photo by Joe Shalmoni courtesy Stand with Us)


The Muqata Blog posted and translated (from Hebrew) this letter from an Israeli soldier serving in Haiti to his parents:

The Delegation to Haiti

In the lifesaving IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, doctors prevent disabilities. They administer aid to the sick, provide warmth, love, and a human touch. They love the wounded.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents located in the middle of a hell, every complex medical case has an ethics review board.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, the chances of success are debated whether to amputate the entire leg of a child: the chances of a premature infant to survive while on a ventilator in a preemie unit in the tent.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation which came from Israel in the Middle East to Haiti, there are American volunteer doctors. They have no other useful installation in which to work in. A doctor and nurse from Germany came. They heard this is best hospital in Haiti. An emergency room team from Colombia arrived with all their equipment and asked if they could set up next to us to be part of our hospital. England is the enlightened country in Europe, the one which has an academic boycott of Israel; twenty British doctors and nurses asked to work with us.

All these people, without exception, stand together at the morning formation at 7 AM in the flag square. The flag of Israel. The flag of a country which was established after the USA was already superpower. After the British left a land under their control. After Colombia was already an established country. After the Holocaust against the Jewish people.

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents, there are equal rights among all. Equal rights in Haiti, which was a nation of slaves, where even today there exists a great social divide between the rich and the poorest of the world's poor.

The IDF Medical Corps Delegation to Haiti which is housed in tents is the embodiment of ultimate human ethics. Brotherhood at its best. The epitome of the verse from the Biblical portion of Kedoshim, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Obama Admin places Haiti relief in hands of overdue-USAID appointee, Rajiv Shah, 36, (instead of military); medical supplies logistics snafus cause havoc, overburdening (even TV) doctors with needless casualties

The Haiti humanitarian aid operation, recent Obama appointee Rajiv Shah, 36, said, is being conducted in close coordination among USAID, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other U.S.-government organizations including the Defense Department, and civilian agencies.



The Obama Administration has been criticized for critical delays caused by taking authority for the rescue mission away from the Pentagon in order to put in in the hands of the uninitiated State Dept appointee, Dr. Shah, who they hadn't appointed until 5 days prior to the Haitian earthquake.

“I think it has been a tremendously positive effect” Secretary of the State Ms Hillary Clinton is thrilled that Mr. Raj Shah is on board,” Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Mr PJ Crowley, told reporters at the daily State Department news conference yesterday.

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CNN's Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta confirm the dearth of medical supplies and stabilizing resources are disillusioning the overtaxed surgeons, physicians, and nurses on location in Haiti.

National Public Radio criticizes TV medical correspondent physicians are putting themselves into the story at the expense of the patients.

"What disturbs me about the media doctors is that they are basically pulling telegenic people out of the queue and giving them exceptional resources," says Dr. Steven Miles, a medical professor and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota.

Miles served as the medical director of the American Refugee Committee for 25 years, and he has overseen relief efforts in places such as Cambodia, Laos and Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He says doctors who largely have experience working in highly advanced civil societies, including the U.S., may not understand the extreme choices facing those addressing catastrophes such as the one in Haiti.

If reporters who are also physicians want so badly to step out of their journalistic role to help, he argues, they should volunteer instead with relief agencies in Haiti — and set aside an hour a day to grant interviews to their network employers.

Israeli trauma surgeon in Haiti allows a crack of emotion

By Catherine Bremer PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - The key to working in a disaster zone hospital, where casualties pile up faster than patients can be discharged, is to avoid getting emotionally involved, says Dr. Ofer Merin, an Israeli army trauma surgeon working in the earthquake-shattered Haitian capital.

Dr. Merin, heading a fully equipped hospital brought in by the Israeli military, said the hardest job was triage -- deciding which casualties were most likely to live with quick treatment or most benefit from intensive care without blocking up beds.



It also is vital not to fret about what will happen to orphaned children with limbs in casts who have to be discharged to free up needed beds, Merin said.

"These are ethical decisions we're not used to taking," he told Reuters on a break from his around-the-clock schedule.

"You try to have almost no emotional connection with the patients, which is so different to what we do back home. You just cannot get emotional in a disaster this big."

He breaks into a grin, though, over four babies born at the camp hospital. One of them is a tiny girl named Sourire -- French for "Smile" -- whose two-months-premature birth may have been triggered by the trauma of Tuesday's massive earthquake.

As Merin shows off the facilities, a skinny 6-year-old girl called Jessica is carried in, plastered with grime, dust and flies, and is scrubbed from head to foot with disinfectant.

Six days after the quake, she has just been dug out of the rubble of her collapsed family home. She is too weak to stand so her aunt, who cannot stop repeating "Thank you, God," holds the trembling girl upright for a nurse.

"When they lifted her out we could not believe she was alive," the aunt told Reuters. "She opened her eyes wide and said, 'My name is Jessica Chatain and I am hungry and thirsty.' She didn't cry but her parents wept a human sea."

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed up to 200,000 people and has left countless victims with horrific injuries.

Foreign governments and aid agencies have flown in medics from around the world but they were only able to get to work in the past couple of days. Some are working in dilapidated hospitals crammed with wailing patients in insanitary conditions.

HARD NOT TO CRY

Set up in green army tents on a soccer field near the airport but equipped to treat even complex injuries, the Israeli military hospital is strangely quiet and scrupulously clean. Patients are identified with bar codes and their progress is tracked on a computer network.

Within hours of the surgeons, paramedics, nurses and soldiers landing late on Friday, people on makeshift stretchers with crushed, gangrenous limbs were lined up outside for beds in the intensive care, pediatric, orthopedic and other wards.

More than 300 patients have been treated and discharged.

In intensive care is a woman whose arm was cut off at the rescue scene to free her. In the operating theater another woman is having her leg amputated above the knee to save her from a potentially lethal infection.

Experts say that with earthquakes, trauma to the head often means instant death and chest trauma can mean dying a day later. With damage to limbs victims can survive a few days before the infection of an open wound or broken bone sets in.

"That's why at this stage most of what we're seeing are orthopedic cases," Dr. Merin said.

He tries to stick to his ban on sentiment but wavers at the sound of nurses cheering on another woman in labor in the maternity ward tent.

Jessica was buried alive because she tried to hide under stairs when the rest of her family jumped out of the window of their home. Now she lies contentedly in the pediatric ward with a drip in her arm and Dr. Merin cracks a little bit.

"Six days underground and look at her now," he mutters. "She's going to be fine. These are the times it's hard not to cry."

CBS and CNN online news editors downplay Israel's role in reporters' stories

Though CBS' Dr. Jennifer Ashton and CNN's Dr. Elizabeth Cohen's video news stories feature Israel's prominent M*A*S*H field hospital, you'd never know it by the omission of any reference to Israel or their field hospital in their story descriptions or blurbs. Why not? Because Israel doing a visibly humanitarian act contradicts their vilified casting of the country, culture, Army, and ethics?
The web editor does their best to marginalize Israel's role in the print story:

Also Monday, a local community hospital with three operating rooms re-opened and just three miles from the large and sophisticated field hospital set up by the Israeli military continues to treat patients and save lives.

Neither story mentions what the problem with America's field hospital is, or why the Israelis are being relied upon, but not recognized, for having to pick up U.S. slack.

In ABC News' Dr. Richard Besser's story, even though he features the Israeli Army field hospital as the saviours of his obstetric crisis, Israel is also omitted in the editors' description online. 3 TV networks news stories feature Israel favorably, 3 networks' websites omit it. Coincidence? Or journalistic-bias?

Israeli humanitarian M*A*S*H field hospital in Haiti working double-duty in America's absence - 'The only ones operating"

Israeli field hospital earns accolades as the only aid mission able to do complex surgery in devastated country. CNN reports other missions transfer patients to Israeli base. ABC reported on young woman giving birth there.

CNN reported that Israel is the only state so far to have sent a field hospital equipped with all that is required for surgical operations. Doctors from various missions send patients requiring surgery to Israel's makeshift hospital, particularly those whose condition is critical, the news network said.

According to the report, other field hospitals contain no more than stretcher beds and medical teams who administer first aid, and they are not prepared for complex surgery.

More than 100 injured patients require surgery, but are unable to get it anywhere except at the Israeli field hospital in Port-au-Prince. The doctors are unable to meet the demand, and meanwhile the patients lie in tents, administered with painkillers, and cry for help. "They'll die within 24 hours if they don't get operated on," CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Elizabeth Cohen reports.

Criticism against the US mission was voiced in the ABC News item. The US had sent staff for a field hospital, but they had still not received the instruments required for surgery. The equipment was supposed to arrive by the weekend, but will get there only Monday night, it seems. Only then will the US be able to set up its field hospital. The Obama White House said that a US ship, to be used as a floating hospital, is also on the way from Baltimore to the earthquake-torn country. The ship, with 600 doctors and nurses as well as medical equipment is due to arrive within two days. (Ynet Mon 18 Jan 2010)



Harvard's Dr. Jennifer Furin treating Haiti's infectious-diseased: "No one except the Israeli hospital has taken (to save the lives of) any of our patients!" With tiny Israel from the far-side of the planet shipping, manning, and running the only humanitarian, mobile surgical hospital on the scene, another American doctor comments about their need to put-upon Israel, America's tiny, under-funded ally, "This almost makes you embarrassed to be an American." Watch CNN's Dr. Elizabeth Cohen's video news report

The Israel Defense Forces' field hospital is currently the largest operating in Port-au-Prince. It has a staff of over 40 doctors, with different specialists, nurses, paramedics and features a maternity ward, ICU, pediatrics unit, internal medicine department, a pharmacy, and operating rooms. The hospital can treat up to 500 patients a day.

Footage from the IDF Field Hospital that has been set up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the earthquake. This video includes footage of the first baby born at the field hospital on 17 January 2010. The mother arrived at the IDF field hospital 8 months pregnant and Maj. Dr. Shir Bar and Maj. Efrat Shayer delivered a healthy baby boy, whose mother named 'Israel' in tribute.



Exactly one year ago, Israel established a free humanitarian hospital to treat wounded Palestinians on the Gaza border. Hamas denied ill Palestinians access to these humanitarian medical services, which operated empty for weeks.