Dr Mohammed Asha And Michael Moore’s NHS Sicko
“TERROR CELL IN NHS,” says the Express. (Pic: The Spine)
No big news for those of us versed in the delights of enemas, porters and hospital food. But surely a sharp cough for Michael Moore, the knowing American polemicist whose film “Sicko” focuses on the U.S. health care system and why the UK’s is so much the superior.
The story, of course, hangs on the life and times of Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, who worked at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire. Readers learn that Asha specialised in neurology and planned to become a brain surgeon.
The Mastermind
Brain surgery is, alongside rocket science, the benchmark against which all things are measured. Writing the Express is not rocket science. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to answer one of the paper’s polls (a puzzler more loaded than George Bush at a frat house party).
But brain surgery might not be all it is cracked up to be, not if Asha is guilty of plotting to blow up three carloads of petrol and nails and kill anyone and everyone in the vicinity.
As we know, the two London bombs failed to go off. The cars were badly parked. And the Glasgow escapade foundered on the would-be mass murderers setting themselves on fire before they managed to detonate their explosives.
The Express says Asha, a suspected member of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell, is a ‘brilliant’ NHS doctor. The Sun says “gifted Asha” graduated from an elite Jordanian academy with straight A exam results in 1998. He was top of the class at the Jordanian University medical school in 2004. Bright, or just the best of a mentally negligible bunch?
This is either damning indictment on the brainpower of NHS staff or suggestive that bombing and doctoring do not mix and that exacting mass slaughter is not as simple as it looks.
Kill Or Cure
Two other Middle Eastern men, both trainee doctors, have been arrested. One, Iraqi Bilal Abdul Samad Abdulla, drove the blazing Jeep into the doorway of Glasgow Airport. Asha’s wife is also of a medical bent. She’s Marwah Dana, 27, a laboratory technician. A fifth doctor, a 26-year-old from Bangalore, India, was arrested in Liverpool.
And there might be more. The Mail speaks of “a loophole with no official security vetting currently necessary for doctors and medical staff coming to Britain from the Middle East.”
Readers learn that investigators have not ruled out the possibility of a second cell of NHS-linked bombers.
The numbers designed to shock and instil fear are: “Of the 240,000 or so doctors currently registered here, more than 6,000 originally qualified in the Middle East. Almost a third – 1,985 – were trained in Iraq and another 184 came from Jordan. There were also significant numbers from Syria (748), Sudan (565) and Iran (488) – all countries linked to extremism.”
Can the pill be mightier than the sword, and more deadly than the bomb? And what does the direction “Take twice a day after jihad” mean anyhow?
Posted: 3rd, July 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (18) | TrackBack | Permalink
