Jul 4
The Doctors’ Plot
The attempted bomb attacks this week in London allegedly by five doctors foreshadows a more dangerous world, according to David Wright, CEO of PharmAthene, a leading biodefense company that develops and commercializes biomedical products to counter chemical and biological weapons.
“The presence of so many physicians is very disquieting,” said Wright. “Given their training in life sciences, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to believe that they may soon graduate from vehicle bombs to bioweapons.”
Which, one assumes, will be transported to the targets in flaming jeeps.
Five of the eight suspects arrested by British authorities are doctors or training to become doctors, according to news articles. One suspect, Bilal Abudulla, earned a medical degree in Baghdad and then moved to Britain where he worked as a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. Another suspect, Mohammed Asha, earned a medical degree in Jordan. He relocated to Britain, where he was training to be a neurosurgeon. A third doctor appears to have been from Bangalore, India.
It isn’t the same thing at all, but the last time this many doctors were up to so much mischief must have been the “Doctors’ Plot” in the Soviet Union, used by Joseph Stalin as a pretext for launching an anti-Jewish pogrom and a purge of his enemies in the Communist Party:
The death of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Khorloogiin Choibalsan in Moscow early in 1952 concerned the ageing and paranoid Stalin who commented, “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov [1], Choibalsan … die so quickly! We must change the old doctors for new ones.” [2] Under torture, prisoners seized in the Soviet investigation of the alleged Doctors’ Plot were compelled to produce ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ that the Kremlin doctors, led by Stalin’s own physician, had in fact assassinated those mentioned by Stalin. [3]
Ironically, Stalin had half of it right: Someone probably was out to poison him, but it was more likely his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria.
