There are some truths so self-evident that to utter them feels faintly absurd, as though one were solemnly reminding a gathering that the sun rises in the east. One such truth is this: doctors should not endorse terrorism. Another: physicians, of all people, should not vilify minorities. The vocation of medicine is to heal, not to wound; to bind up, not to tear apart. And yet, to our collective dismay, we find ourselves confronting precisely this outrage: a doctor of the National Health Service using the open forum of the internet to laud Hamas, an organisation proscribed in its entirety under the Terrorism Act 2000, while simultaneously regurgitating ancient libels against the Jewish people.
This is not, as some might airily suggest, merely a matter of “political opinion.” The law is unambiguous. To express support for Hamas is to trespass into criminality. Section 12 of the Terrorism Act is clear: one may not invite support for, glorify, or in any way promote a proscribed terrorist group. This is not the realm of debate but of prohibition. The doctor in question has, in plain terms, stepped beyond the rights of expression into the territory of offence.
Nor is this merely a legal question. Medicine itself is governed by a covenant, articulated through the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice: treat all patients fairly, act with integrity, and never behave in ways that corrode public trust in the profession. A doctor who proclaims allegiance to terrorists and traffics in antisemitic caricature betrays all three obligations. One cannot be the custodian of patient safety on the ward while glorifying murderers on social media.
What sharpens the outrage is the contrast with how the GMC has behaved in the past. Doctors have been suspended for ill-judged remarks on Facebook, for misleading tweets about vaccines, for financial irregularities, for failing to disclose secondary earnings. All of these have rightly been taken seriously. Yet how strange it would be if a clumsy comment about masks or an undeclared consultancy were deemed expulsion-worthy, while endorsing a proscribed terrorist organisation were not. The inconsistency is not merely embarrassing; it is intolerable.
At stake is the very trust that sustains our health service. The relationship between doctor and patient is, in essence, a kind of secular sacrament: the patient lays bare their weakness, their secrets, their vulnerabilities, on the understanding that they will be treated with impartiality. If you are a Jewish patient, and you know that the individual in the white coat before you has praised Hamas — an organisation that seeks your eradication — how can you possibly feel safe? And if Jews are today singled out, what assurance have Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, or LGBT Britons that they will not be next? Prejudice once admitted into the surgery does not remain politely confined. It spreads like contagion.
And there is more, darker still. Doctors are figures of extraordinary authority in our culture. If they endorse extremist propaganda, they lend it a legitimacy it does not deserve. The radical fringe suddenly finds its rhetoric echoed not by a wild-eyed agitator but by a registered healer. A stethoscope bestows a false dignity upon barbarism. In this sense, the risk of radicalisation is not theoretical. It is imminent and acute.
Beyond the clinic, the integrity of the NHS itself trembles. For generations, the NHS has stood as the crown jewel of British fairness, a system where wealth, creed, and colour count for nothing at the bedside. To allow it to harbour those who openly support terrorism is to permit a stain upon that jewel. Once the public begins to suspect that the NHS is no longer neutral, no longer safe from the infiltration of hatred, trust will crumble — and once lost, such trust is rarely recovered.
There will be those who reach instinctively for the phrase “freedom of speech.” But let us be clear: the law does not — and never has — protected the glorification of terrorism. Nor does it give sanctuary to those who seek to make minorities objects of fear or scorn. Free speech, yes; free incitement, no. To confuse the two is to endanger the very liberties we claim to defend.
This, then, is why government must act, and act decisively. It is not enough to tut or to issue vague reassurances. There must be inquiry — real, searching inquiry — into how such an individual was permitted to remain in post. There must be clarity that to align oneself with a proscribed terrorist organisation is to forfeit the privilege of medical registration. There must be coordination with counter-terrorism authorities, for what is at issue is not merely professional etiquette but criminal law. And there must, above all, be an unambiguous statement from the Secretary of State that hate and extremism have no home in British healthcare.
Lives are, quite literally, at stake. When trust in a doctor collapses, patients delay or avoid seeking treatment. When extremist propaganda is legitimised, the vulnerable are drawn towards its orbit. When antisemitism is tolerated, hatred metastasises until other communities, too, find themselves in the crosshairs. What begins with a libel online can end in a life lost.
W.H. Auden, ever the chronicler of human frailty, once remarked that evil is “unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” One might add: sometimes it wears a white coat and prescribes medicine by day, only to prescribe hatred by night. It is Parliament’s solemn duty to ensure that such contradictions cannot exist within the NHS.
To defend the neutrality of healthcare is to defend civilisation itself. And neutrality in healthcare cannot — must not — be mistaken for neutrality towards terrorism. On this, the Government must speak and act with courage, clarity, and conviction. The time for ambiguity is past.
