The headline from Australian Doctor (2/4/20) reads, “GP suspended for ‘endorsing genocide’ on social media”.
Free speech is one thing; incitement to violence is another. If Melbourne GP Jereth Kok has used social media to endorse genocide, then the decision by the Medical Board of Australia to suspend his registration is justified. If he has done no such thing, then the Board has acted disgracefully, wrongfully defaming Dr Kok and destroying his medical career.
We can judge for ourselves which is the guilty party.
Below is the one and only post in which Dr Kok refers to genocide, of the thirty or so posts presented by the Board to the recent Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal appeal. Dr Kok shared this dossier of posts with a couple of support people last year and I can confirm that this is his only statement alluding to genocide.
Context is everything. Kok is commenting in 2012 on an article by Christian social commentator Bill Muehlenberg entitled, “When Aid Money becomes Killing Money”. Muehlenberg objected to the Australian Labor Government joining other Western governments in funding abortions in poor countries. He argued that “what we really have is coercive utopians from the West working overtime to decimate the populations of poor overseas nations” and quoted a pro-life leader from the US characterising such policies as “population control aimed at poor dark-skinned women”.
The staunchly pro-life Dr Kok posted this bitterly ironic comment:
Thanks to “family planning”, developed nations (Europe, Japan, North America) are in steep decline and are facing an impending financial and economic crisis that comes with an aged population.
See for example what is happening in Japan:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12296077Soon, our civilisations will be vanquished, and the Earth will be overrun by Black people. The solution is clear: we must take “family planning” to poor countries and exterminate them before it is too late!
Jereth Kok
Anybody with a reading age above 12 can tell, in context, that this is irony, a rhetorical device by which Kok scorns the decadent West for exporting its culture of death to poor countries. The Medical Board, however, asserts the exact opposite: that Dr Kok’s comment is an endorsement of genocide! Incredibly, the VCAT agrees, headlines come out about Kok endorsing genocide and both his reputation and career are trashed.
How can the Medical Board of Australia perpetrate such an absurd injustice? The Board has gravely defamed this GP and owes him an immediate apology and public retraction.
David van Gend is a GP in Toowoomba.
