Hatred of Israel cuts deep to heart

AMMAN, Jordan - A hole in the heart of Diyar Raouf’s 6-year-old son threatens his life.

But in Mrs. Raouf’s heart lies a hatred of Israel that is so great that at the last minute, the Iraqi woman declined to let Israeli surgeons touch her son.

“These feelings were born with us. They are inbred,” said Mrs. Raouf, who jumped at an offer from Algeria to perform the same operation.

The Israeli charity Save A Child’s Heart arranged for them to travel to Amman, where her son Ahmad was undergoing tests before the surgery in Israel to correct a pulmonary valve stenosis - a disease that restricts the flow of blood to the lungs.

Instead of departing for Tel Aviv as planned, the two arrived Friday in Algiers, after an Iraqi doctor in Amman intervened and the Algerian government pledged the cost of transport, housing and a medical team to perform surgeries on 14 children so they would not have to go to Israel.

“We hear about this, the way they kill our children in Palestine. All of this we see,” Mrs. Raouf said. “We are not afraid of going to any other country.”

Hours earlier, she and two other Iraqi mothers who made up the first group to go to Algeria for the surgeries were visited by George Bakoos, an envoy sent by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to investigate what has become a burgeoning controversy in Iraqi and Arab media.

An Iraqi television station called it a matter of “sending Iraqi children with their guardians for treatment in the enemy country No. 1 for Iraq and Arabic nations.”

The Jerusalem Post, quoting Al Jazeera, reported that the Iraqi Parliament’s Health and Environment Committee is calling for an investigation. The Health Ministry claims it didn’t know of the work happening inside the country.

Shatha Fakhri faced a similar situation with her daughter Sara and took the child to the National Iraqi Assistance Center located in the Green Zone.

Mrs. Fakhri was approached by the group Brothers Together, or Shevat Achim in its Hebrew moniker. The group, which was founded in 1994 with the purpose of helping non-Israeli children receive lifesaving medical care in Israel, offered their assistance.

In Baghdad, Mrs. Fakhri was told 2 1/2-year-old Sara may be taken to either Israel or somewhere in Europe for dual surgeries to fix the corrected transposition with valve malfunction in her heart.

“It’s the only way I see it at the time. I can’t refuse it,” she said. “Maybe it’s the only chance to save my child. If I refuse it, maybe I don’t have a second chance. So I say yes at this time.”

According to a letter to Jordanian immigration officers and obtained by The Washington Times, Mrs. Fakhri on March 3 flew to Amman. Doctors at the Jordan Red Crescent office told her the next day that the operation would take place in a Tel Aviv hospital.

Over the next two months, Sara would need regular medical attention. An Iraqi doctor suggested that she see Dr. Omar al Kubaisy, an Iraqi cardiologist at the private al Israa Hospital, who had assembled other Iraqi doctors in a two-room office in a special practice for Iraqi refugees in Amman.

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