UPDATE: NYC Hospital Says Alleged White Supremacist Doctor Isn't Suspended, Just 'Off Duty'

via Medium

A doctor in the Bronx has been suspended pending an investigation by the hospital into his alleged white supremacist views, after an article published on Medium earlier this week claimed to prove the doctor's affiliation with several neo-Nazi websites, and suggested that he had argued for the forced deportation of people of color in order to create a white ethnostate.

The article, which has since been removed by Medium, identified Dov Bechhofer, a resident radiologist at Montefiore Medical Center, as a prolific commenter known as "Dov" on the blog for white nationalist publishing house Counter-Currents. According to the post, both Bechhofer and the user "Dov" have several notable similarities, including their birthplaces, occupations, taste in obscure films, and shared connection to white nationalist figures like Jared Taylor, Gregory Hood, and Spencer Quinn. "On Facebook [Bechhofer] is friends with roughly a dozen white supremacist authors," the anonymous author of the post noted.

As a result of the article's allegations, Bechhofer has been "taken off duty," Montefiore confirmed on Wednesday (this is distinct from being "suspended," the spokesperson noted, but did not clarify the distinction).

"As soon as we learned of the Medium.com article, the employee was placed off duty pending the results of a thorough investigation," the hospital said in a statement. "The views expressed in the article are in no way reflective of Montefiore, our mission, how we conduct ourselves, or the care we deliver each day."

Reached for comment on Wednesday, Bechhofer told Gothamist, "I understand that I'm not supposed to speak about this. I'm not discussing it at this moment."

In mountains of archived comments sections linked to in the Medium post, "Dov" repeatedly voices his support for a white ethnostate, a goal he seems willing to resort to violence to achieve. "“[A]ll the signs point to extra-democratic solutions now being the only way for the various ethnicities of the White race to save themselves," he wrote at one point. "The great question is how to overcome the differential of firepower between government and citizen.”

Elsewhere, he opined that "the significant damage resulting from Charlottesville has little to nothing to do with Fields’s action with his car" and that "the major failure of [Unite the Right] was not the violence.”

In addition to being a strident white nationalist, "Dov"—like Bechhofer—is also Jewish. He is open about this fact on the Counter-Currents website, and says that he'd once considered writing "A Jewish Defense of Anti-Semitism" and that "in White ethnostates (which I hope to see materialize ASAP), Jews must be considered foreign elements."

"It’s clearer with each passing day that from functional and practical standpoints, [Jewish people] need to be considered either non-White or perennially anti-White concerning aspirations of and strategies for the White race moving forward,” he wrote, in response to a Spencer Quinn article titled "Jews Are Not White People (a Response to a Response)."

On Facebook, meanwhile, Bechhofer apparently described himself last year as "SS/SK," meaning he follows the rules of the Sabbath and eats Kosher. Yet he also used the account to publicly signal his anti-semitism, commenting "“(((Leibovitz)))" on a story posted by the anti-immigration hate website VDARE—the triple parentheses are a noted neo-Nazi symbol used to indicate a person is Jewish.

Additionally, he used his public account to call for the mass expulsion of Muslims from Europe, writing “the West has no use for them, and they’ll be just fine when they go home,” in a Facebook group called "God Emperor Trump (Official)." Such comments, the Medium doxxer notes, make clear that Bechhofer "is a danger not only to his community but particularly to his patients."

We've reached out to Montefiore Medical Center about the status of the investigation, and will update if we hear back.