“These posts were made years before I was accepted into medical school, when I was a naïve, and impressionable girl barely out of high school. I matured into a young adult during the years I attended college and medical school, and adopted strong values of inclusion, tolerance, and humanity. I take my profession and the Hippocratic Oath seriously and would never intentionally cause harm to any patient seeking medical care. As a physician, I will always strive to give the best medical treatment to all people, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, or culture.”
Actually, Lara, those posts were not “made years before” you went to medical school. They went on for six years, including all the years you were in medical school. Have you forgotten? Indeed, they became steadily more vehement during your time in medical school and after graduating. You say you “take..the Hippocratic Oath seriously and would never intentionally cause harm to any patent seeking medical care,” but your remark about “giving yahoods” the “wrong meds” is as clear a contradiction of that Oath as can be found. Why was it that you had this sudden revelation as to your “real views” — the ones that completely contradict everything you have been saying about Jews and Israel from 2011 to 2017 — only when you were found out? Remember how you first solemnly denied having written them, then when confronted with so much incontrovertible evidence, finally admitted you had, and as a result you were then fired from your job at the Cleveland Clinic?
“I have learned from this experience and am sorry for the pain I have caused. I pray that the Jewish community will understand and forgive me. I hope to make amends so that we can move forward and work together towards a better future for us all.”
Nonsense. I don’t think she’s sorry “for the pain” she “caused.” She’s sorry for the pain that she herself has been caused, by having been found out. What she “learned from the experience” is to watch what you tweet, for all kinds of people may be listening. She learned that, as a doctor, it is inadvisable to make threats to murder your patients. Believe it or not, it could get you in trouble.
Here’s one conceivable way “forward” for Lara Kollab:
Over a period of six years, I wrote many dozens of vile antisemitic tweets, the worst of which was one in which I, a doctor, essentially threatened to kill Jews by prescribing the wrong medications for them. I am a “Palestinian” Arab who every summer would return to the Arab-run parts of Palestine, where I easily picked up the antisemitic attitudes of my extended family and friends, whose extreme view of the Arab-Israeli conflict led many of them — and led me, too — to hate Jews irrationally, even hysterically, as the sole cause of every misfortune. We blamed “the Jews” for everything. The vast corruption of our leaders, the lack of human rights under the Palestinian Authority, the greedy lords of misrule like Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshaal, the tactics of terror the “Palestinians” so willingly employed and praised, the antisemitism that was in the very air I breathed — none of this seemed to matter, made no impression on me. These were the views that festered within, and that kept me from any rational analysis of the situation, prevented me from understanding, in the slightest, the Israeli view of things. I was consumed with victimhood and with hate. And that is what led to those intolerable tweets. I meant them. They expressed what I felt. I first said that these tweets were written “some years ago,” but in truth I continued to write such tweets until 2017, when I finally stopped. And though I mentioned “several” tweets there were, in fact, several dozen.
I am attempting to explain, not to justify, my behavior. It has been intolerable, and I do not think I should be exempt from punishment. I have quite understandably been discharged from my job at the Cleveland Clinic, and I do not intend to try to continue work in the medical field in this country for at least five years. Rather, I will spend that time working as a volunteer — even as a nurse if my medical license is revoked — with medical groups overseas, almost certainly in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa, but not in the Muslim Middle East. That should give me enough time to learn more, as I sort out my thoughts on what I did, and why I did it. I am convinced that in that time, I will become more understanding of those I had regarded, quite irrationally, as my mortal enemies. I have already acquired a long list of books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including some that treat of Islamic history and the Jihad, that I intend to read during these next few years abroad. I would like to thank those people, not all of them Jewish, who sent me messages, not just to condemn what I wrote, but also to suggest the possibility that real change was possible, that even I might benefit from study of the conflict. And so I remain both horrified at what I have done in the past, and hopeful about the future.