Look who’s comparing Israelis with Nazis

The Daily Telegraph reports today that the elderly and vulnerable have been used as human guinea pigs in certain Israeli hospitals without the relevant permissions:

Some children had their eardrums deliberately pierced so that a drug, not approved for medical use anywhere else in the world, could be applied. Such tests needed approval but the hospital did not apply to the ministry.

In another case, a painful procedure using a needle to draw urine from the bladder for testing was performed without the necessary ministry approval.

Unlicensed drugs and invasive procedures were also used on patients, sometimes by researchers who were not even doctors. In one clear conflict of interest the researcher was employed by the commercial company selling the procedure.

The latter point is actually not confined to Israel – doctors in the pay of the drug industry being over-eager to administer drugs is known of in the UK and the US (look at the shocking report in the current Mother Jones entitled Medicating Aliah if you want to know more). What is significant is this passage in the article:

The image of helpless victims being experimented on is especially sensitive in Israel because of the horrors inflicted on Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz by its Nazi camp doctor, Josef Mengele.

They then point out that these tests bear no relation to Mengele’s experiments, but then these are experiments on vulnerable people nonetheless. The print edition actually has a picture of Dr Mengele alongside the article, which really surprised me given the paper’s reputation for tenderness to Israel.