anti-Semitism in the Red Cross
Bernadine Healy forced out as president of the American Red Cross over anti-Semitism issue
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/011224ta_talk_mayer
Last week, Healy offered her own account of what had happened. Working out of a borrowed office in downtown Washington, she said that she had been forced to resign because she had angered the board of governors by moving too aggressively to address what some see as a legacy of anti-Semitism in the Red Cross. "There's no question about it—this was the one that broke the camel's back," she said.
The issue involves the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which is the Red Cross's international membership body, based in Geneva, and its policy toward the Israeli version of the Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, or the M.D.A. Since 1949, the Israelis, who have only "observer" status with the federation, have been applying for full membership, which would entitle them to vote and to sit on committees. But they have refused to accept as their emblem either the red cross used by most of the world or the red crescent used by Muslim countries, and the international federation has refused to approve the Israelis' use of the Star of David. Federation officials say that approval of a new emblem would require a majority of the member countries to vote to amend the Geneva convention. Given the tensions in the Middle East, that is not likely to happen soon.
No one, including the Israelis, paid much attention to the issue until Healy took over the Red Cross, in September, 1999. Within weeks, she had become an ardent champion of the M.D.A.'s campaign for membership. In her view, the exclusion of Israel was "hurting the American Red Cross." "Many in the Jewish community, and others, found it shocking," she said. "It was reinforcing a sense that many people had had in the past, since the days of the Holocaust, that there is a discriminatory attitude in the Red Cross, whether that is true or not." (The reputation of the international organization was tainted during the Second World War because it continued to recognize the German Red Cross. Red Cross officials failed to acknowledge early reports of Jewish death camps, and declined to classify incarcerated Jews as protected prisoners of war. And, after the war, it provided documentation for Nazi fugitives, such as Josef Mengele—unwittingly, according to the Red Cross.)
"I'm a pre-women's-lib woman," said Healy, a fifty-seven-year-old cardiologist who grew up in an Irish-American household in Queens and was educated at Hunter College High School, Vassar, Harvard Medical School, and Johns Hopkins. "I came into a world in which I saw discrimination. I remember Jewish doctors I trained with being unable to practice outside Jewish hospitals."
Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whom Healy brought into the Red Cross as a special ambassador on the M.D.A. issue, said last week that his impression was that Healy's championship of the M.D.A. was "the cause" of her being forced out. He went on, "But, totally fortuitously for the Red Cross board, September 11th came along. The board members have done their best to make it look as if they didn't like what she was doing with the money. But she tells me that the board approved everything she did."
O'Reilly interviewed Healy shortly after Katrina, I think. She begged him to differentiate between the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross. She said there was a lot of corruption in the International Red Cross that was beginning to filter into our own. I'm not surprised she was forced out.