Debbie Schlussel reports about the terrible death of a man who went to the emergency room with a distended abdomen. Twelve hours later he died. What makes this story malpractice (if true) is the fact that the man’s complaint was easily remedied, and that the doctor on call somehow failed to see him during the 12 hours between his admission and his death. What makes this story newsworthy (if true) is that the patient was Jewish, and that the doctor was a British Muslim man, trained at Ain Shams University Medical School in Egypt. The doctor knew that the patient, Joseph Applebaum was present in his ER, but did not give him any medical care.
Debbie Schlussel concludes that this was a manifest case of practicing medicine while Muslim:
Why did Dr. Ibrahim neglect a patient who came in with an easily treatable condition and leave him to die, 12 hours later? It appears it can only be because he did not want to treat a Jewish patient and let him live. There can be no other reason.
Mr. Applebaum’s son, Michael, is a medical doctor and an attorney. While he was waiting for Dr. Ibrahim to see his father, he called Dr. Ibrahim and alerted him to the growingly severe condition his father was in and that his father was suffering from an acute abdomen. Dr. Ibrahim claimed he examined Mr. Applebaum. But that was a lie. He’d never seen him.
And he essentially murdered him by denying treatment. It’s a case of extreme negligence and medical malpractice for the apparent purpose of anti-Semitic murder.
Joseph Applebaum’s son Michael is now suing Dr. Ibrahim, the hospital–Rush North Shore Medical Center, and others involved in his father’s murder. The case is filed in Illinois, and he is looking for a good attorney to pursue the case he has filed. If you are interested or can help, please contact him at the website he set up to document this ongoing tragedy.
The lawsuit here will be useful, because it sould reveal a detail that’s missing from this story: where were the nurses and PAs (physician assistants) while all of this was going on? The fact is that, in most emergency rooms that I’ve visited (and I’ve visited a few in my time), non-physician personnel are the first front in the medical care. A nurse performs triage, a nurse or PA takes your vitals, and a nurse or PA checks on you and interacts with your worried relatives. Whether Dr. Ibrahim’s motive was anti-Semitism or he committed garden-variety malpractice (making him the type of doctor known as a 007 or licensed to kill), the entire staff would have had to have been equally complicit, whether they too were anti-Semitic or criminally negligent. The filings on the website linked in the story also establish that a lot of the defendants are Jewish doctors. There’s therefore something fishy about the facts as given.
Frankly, the website linked in Schlussel’s original post is rather strange. It presents the facts as “a novel” (which I haven’t read as of this time), while at the same time including Mr. Applebaum’s original medical records, as well as the actual pleadings in the lawsuit. I haven’t read those records either (you know the thing about doctor’s handwriting), nor have I read the pleadings, but some of the information in those documents might help answer my questions — or might reveal even more questions that should be asked. As it is, I really have to remind myself to follow up on this story, because the outcome will be fascinating.
Hat tip: Richard Baehr
Filed under: Anti-Semitism
I hope this isn’t true. My heart aches for this son.
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Wearing my skeptic hat here. Chicago Rush is a University Hospital in the North Shore suburb of Skokie. I can tell you from experience that Skokie is no crap hole; it is rather large and upscale.
If he had gone to Stroger Hospital that would be different.
In any event I can’t imagine that Rush would have a doctor that would selectively choose not to treat Jews; especially in Skokie. In fact Skokie is surround by one of the largest Jewish populations on the North Shore on all of its borders. Skokie itself is primarily Jewish and has a large amount of families that was originally built on an influx of Holocaust
survivors.
So something doesn’t jive here and I think that Schlussel might have let her intense focus on radical Islam get to her in this case.
Sudden Iatrogenic Jihad Syndrome?
One can file a lawsuit and allege any set of facts; I think it best to wait and see how this plays outs. There’s a lot of litigation that no real basis in reality.
There may have been malpractice in this case but I am struggling to believe that it was due to Mr. Applebaum being Jewish. In addition to the fact that the hospital is in Skokie, which is a large suburb that is predominantly Jewish, I find it literally incredible that ALL of the medical personnel conspired with the doctor’s alleged refusal to provide treatment.
Debbie Schlussel and other commentators who are legitimately concerned about the presence of radical Islam in America need to be very, very careful with their allegations. We already are fighting an uphill battle to get the public aware of the danger of such radicalism. Making allegations in the absence of facts will simply undermine the numerous cases in which there ARE plenty of facts.
I’m not sure what a large suburb of Jewish folks has to do with why this is an innocent misunderstanding. Because one of the things that a doctor-assassin would do, is try to find Jewish concentrations of folks and get there, assuming the doctor is an assassin in the first place. So that means large concentrations of Jewish folks doesn’t really change much of anything in this case.
I’ll wait for the facts to churn out of course, although the place of origin for this guy doesn’t give an all too good gut reaction.
Ymarsakar –
I am certain that it is not an innocent misunderstanding. Something clearly did not happen that should have happened while Mr. Applebaum was in the hospital.
My point about Skokie being a predominantly Jewish area is that while a radical bent on destroying Jews would certainly find it a target rich environment, there is a high probability that the hospital has many Jewish doctors, nurses, and other medical and support staff with whom a person would interact once he or she is admitted. I just don’t believe that it is likely that throughout Mr. Applebaum’s stay, he was only in contact with people who would do him such harm.
I agree that we must wait for the facts. I also am not getting any warm fuzzies here but the claim is explosive and because of that, it is important to determine the facts.
I did visit Debbie Shlussel’s site which is extremely disturbing. I can’t begin to fathom why she is so angry and racist at a physician which she never encountered. Whatever happened to this patient is sad but I don’t believe it was a religious issue. This hospital is in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and almost all the physicians are also Jewish. If this “muslim” doctor was a resident then a ER doc would have had to refer the patient to him. Then after the resident sees the patient he informs the ER doc of his diagnosis. So this wasn’t just one doctor’s “hate crime” as her site states. It is in the court’s hands now.