Cleveland Clinic Resident Loses Medical License Over Anti-Semitic Tweets

Lara Kollab, a former resident at a Cleveland medical clinic, had her license revoked since the exposure of her tweets threatening Jewish lives over a year ago. 

By United with Israel Staff

The State Medical Board of Ohio permanently revoked the medical training certificate of a former Cleveland Clinic resident who posted virulently anti-Semitic comments and threats on social media, cleveland.com reported on Saturday.

“Lara Kollab agreed to surrender her certificate before the medical board revoked it Aug. 12, records say,” according to the local website.

Kollab is permanently prohibited from practicing osteopathic medicine or surgery in the state of Ohio or from participating in any other medical training program, the agreement says.

In a tweet posted in 2013, for instance, Kollab wrote: “People who support Israel should have their immune cells killed so they can see how it feels to not be able to defend yourself from foreign invaders.”

The tweets were publicized towards the end of 2018 by Canary Mission, a website dedicated to monitoring anti-Semitism among anti-Israel activists in North America. “Lara Kollab has called for violence against Jews, spread anti-Semitism, trivialized the Holocaust, defended the terror organization Hamas, and supported terrorists on Twitter,” the Canary Mission reported.

On December 31, the Cleveland Clinic announced that it had severed ties with Kollab, who was employed there from July to September 2018.

In a formal complaint filed with the Ohio State Board of Medical Examiners, following the revelations, Jay Sekulow, head of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and an attorney for President Donald Trump, wrote on behalf of the ACLJ and the Zionist Organization of America that Kollab should be stripped of her license.

Sekulow described Kollab as “unfit to practice medicine” because of her comments, posted between 2011 and 2017. In 2012, for example, she wrote that she would “purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds.” That same year, Kollab called for the “defeat” of “the Zionist state through force.”

Sekulow’s letter of complaint was dated January 4, 2019, the same day that Kollab released a statement of apology through her attorney.

“I wish sincerely and unequivocally to apologize for the offensive and hurtful language contained in those posts. These posts were made years before I was accepted into medical school, when I was a naïve,and impressionable girl barely out of high school. I matured into a young adult during the years I attended college and medical school, and adopted strong values of inclusion, tolerance, and humanity,” Kollab, then 27, said.

“This statement is not intended to excuse the content of the posts, but rather to demonstrate that those words do not represent who I am and the principles I stand for today,” she added.

The medical board also cited Kollab for claiming she was being framed by Canary Mission, an organization that works to expose anti-Semitic views, according to cleveland.com. Furthermore, the site continues, when applying for another job at Kern Medical Center in California, Kollab claimed she had resigned from the Cleveland clinic rather than disclosing that she was fired.

Several organizations, including United with Israel, have demanded that Kollab’s certificate be revoked