What to do about orchestrated email campaigns

doi:10.1136/bmj.b500

Published 24 February 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b500
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b500

Editorials

What to do about orchestrated email campaigns

Authors, editors, publishers, advertisers, and shareholdersshould ignore them

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Karl Sabbagh’s article in our Analysis section (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2066)examines emails sent to the BMJ’s acting editor, KamranAbbasi,¹ in response to a BMJ article criticising Israel.² Inthe article published in 2004, Derek Summerfield asked whetherthe death of an Arab weighed the same as that of a US or Israelicitizen. Behind this question was his claim that the Israeliarmy had killed more unarmed Palestinian civilians since September2000 than the number of people who died on 11 September 2001.In addition, he alleged that the pattern of injuries suggestedthat Israeli soldiers had been routinely authorised to shootPalestinian children in situations of minimal or no threat—acharge that was later corroborated by Israeli soldiers.³

Based on his analysis of emails, Sabbagh concludes that theBMJ was the target of an orchestrated campaign to silence criticismof Israel. And that is certainly how it . . . [Full text of this article]

Tony Delamothe, deputy editor, Fiona Godlee, editor

¹ BMJ, London WC1H 9JR

tdelamothe@bmj.com

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