Conservatism rests on enduring principles: the sanctity of human life, religious freedom, accountability, and skepticism toward unchecked government power. That is why Ian Kingsbury’s recent Washington Examiner article criticizing my lecture on Gaza at the American Psychiatric Association deserves a response.
Kingsbury’s position is fundamentally at odds with both conservative and Judeo-Christian principles: it places loyalty to a foreign government above accountability, while replacing the Abrahamic imperatives of truth, human dignity, and protection of innocent life with attacks on those who challenge that government’s conduct.
The suffering of Palestinian Christians should be particularly troubling to conservatives. In Gaza, Israeli strikes destroyed the ancient Churches of St. Porphyrius and the Holy Family, killing scores of Christians sheltering inside. Inside Israel, spitting attacks against Christians have almost doubled, while vandalism, intimidation, and efforts to seize church properties are on the rise. In the West Bank, Christian villages have suffered settler violence and the desecration of churches, compelling Pope Leo XIV to call for the protection of Christians and their places of worship.
Kingsbury’s efforts to call this antisemitism are absurd. Recent polls indicate that roughly two-thirds of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, while nearly one-third believe it has committed genocide against Palestinians; among religiously unaffiliated Jewish Americans, that figure rises to roughly 40%.
Anyone who examines my lecture will find it deeply rooted in Holocaust scholarship, including Robert Jay Lifton’s work on Nazi physicians. I described the Holocaust is the prototypical genocide and specifically stated that “the scale of suffering, brutality, and loss remains almost incomprehensible even eighty years later.” Kingsbury nonetheless takes my statements out of context and claims that I stated that the evidence of the Holocaust was “fragmented and incomplete.” I said no such thing. My discussion concerned only the evidentiary challenges confronting prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials around the trial of Hermann Göring for his role in Kristallnacht.
Most importantly, the arguments Kingsbury distorts were intended to reject antisemitism and collective blame: Jewish people must not be held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, just as Muslims must not be held collectively responsible for the actions of the 9/11 terrorists. Conflating criticism of Israel with hostility toward Jews erases the diversity of Jewish existence, creating the very collective essentialism and stereotyping that the struggle against antisemitism seeks to overcome.
Kingsbury wields the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a blunt instrument to defend his position, overlooking that the definition itself explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” The Washington Examiner itself has previously emphasized precisely this point.
The “blood libel” accusation is equally misplaced. The historical blood libel was a fabricated accusation against oppressed Jewish communities. The Gaza genocide allegation concerns the documented conduct of a state and its armed forces. It can be investigated, challenged, corroborated, or disproved. Calling it a blood libel answers none of the evidence.
And that is the central weakness of Kingsbury’s argument. He attacks the critics but does not address the conduct being criticized. If the genocide allegation is wrong, demonstrate why. Explain which element of the Genocide Convention has been misapplied. Address the civilian deaths, the destruction of hospitals, churches, and mosques, blocking food, water, and medicine, mass displacement, and the statements of Israeli leaders relevant to intent. Calling critics antisemites answers none of these questions.
IT STARTS WITH THE JEWS. IT NEVER ENDS THERE
For physicians, the obligation is clear. Protecting life and opposing the destruction of healthcare are not partisan causes; they are matters of medical ethics. I condemn antisemitism. I condemn Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. And I condemn the destruction of Palestinian civilian life in Gaza. There is no contradiction. Medical ethics, conservative values, and Christian morality demand the same courage: to defend innocent life, hold power accountable, and refuse to allow political allegiance to justify human suffering. As Scripture commands: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves” (Proverbs 31:8–9).
Fellow participants of the APA Chester M. Pierce Human Rights Award lecture, Drs. Steven Sharfstein and Ravi Chandra have reviewed and endorsed this op-ed.
Dr. Mansoor Malik, MD, MBA, is a board-certified psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.