Omar Getting Pushback From Muslim

Qanta Ahmed: Ilhan Omar is a disgrace to Islam and doesn’t represent my Muslim religion

 By Qanta Ahmed | Fox News

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Freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar under fire for 9/11 comments

CAIR-Florida chief executive director Hassan Shibly on Rep. Omar's controversial 9/11 remarks.

Rep. Ilhan Omar continues to be an embarrassment and a disgrace for me and other American Muslims with her outrageous, ignorant, anti-Semitic and now anti-American comments.

And while Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, holds herself out as a proud Muslim, she repeatedly projects a distorted and patently Islamist interpretation of Islam – a religion that in reality stands for the values of justice, peace and ethical conduct.

Sadly, Omar gives millions of Americans a false impression of what Islam is and what we Muslims believe and stand for. While she denounces prejudice against Muslims, her aberrant views on Islam fuel prejudice against me and my coreligionists by distorting who we are while defaming and dishonoring the great monotheism of Islam.

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Omar’s latest absurd and insulting comment came to light just a few days ago. Describing the horrific Islamist terrorist attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed almost 3,000 people and injured more than 6,000 others – including many Muslims – Omar told a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fundraiser: “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

First, Omar betrayed her ignorance, because CAIR was founded in 1994. Second, the congresswoman displayed an appalling and dismissive insensitivity to the worst foreign attack on America in our history, claiming almost 600 more lives than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Omar's grotesque trivialization of a national tragedy amounts to an explicit denial of 9/11 – a desecration of all the lives erased that awful day. This denial is inexplicable unless she has strong and covert Islamist sympathies.

Tragically, the Sept. 11 attacks continue to take a toll almost 18 years later.

Some estimate more than 2,100 first responders who worked in Ground Zero in New York City in an effort to save lives and then find the deceased after the attacks have died of diseases they incurred. More than 10,000 people have been diagnosed with cancer related to the World Trade Center attacks and over 43,000 have been certified with World Trade Center-related illnesses.

Omar should be honest. There is no escaping the fact that the atrocities of 9/11 were not simply committed by “some people.” Islamist jihadists were responsible and they came from within the Muslim fold.

Most of the almost 490,000 Americans who either lived near Ground Zero or responded to the recovery and rebuilding efforts have never enrolled in the government’s health programs. So we don’t know how many more have suffered health problems from the terrorist attack on the twin towers.

I am a physician now working in New York and I’m affiliated with New York University Winthrop Hospital’s World Trade Center Health Program. I see the burden of Sept. 11 on a regular basis, treating brave and selfless first responders who still suffer from complex sleep disorders – including post-traumatic stress – that I specialize in treating.

President Trump responded to Omar’s comments by posting a video on Twitter mixing her words with terrible scenes of the Sept. 11 attacks. His action can be considered insensitive to many 9/11 survivors and family members – including some of my own patients – who can’t view these pictures without experiencing repeat trauma.

However, the president’s exposure of Omar’s hypocrisy and offensive diminishment of 9/11 was both legitimate and necessary.

In her dismissal of Sept. 11, Omar callously erased the deep suffering of every survivor and family I attend, and everyone else still impacted by the terrorist attacks.

Like each person old enough to remember Sept. 11, 2001, the day will be engraved in my mind for as long as I live.

I was working as a physician in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was 4 p.m. when I turned on my TV and watched the world come to a standstill as I witnessed (along with people around the world) the jet planes go through the World Trade Center, and soon after saw the twin towers collapse.

Mass murder on live TV – an unbelievable nightmare, like a horror film come to life.

Living at the time in the Saudi Kingdom – the epicenter of Islam – as the world learned the identity of the 9/11 terrorists, I wondered how my religion had been hijacked by suicidal killers who claimed they had a religious duty to kill innocents.

And I knew from that moment that these murderers would now become the face of Islam for many non-Muslims who know little about a religion with more the 1.6 billion followers around the globe.

Of course, only the perpetrators of the 9/11attacks and their supporters are to blame for their evil and immoral massacre. But on that sad day it became the responsibility of every Muslim to understand the heinous perversion of Islam known as Islamist jihadism and to stand against it.

In her grotesque trivialization of the Sept. 11 attacks, Omar betrays the Islam she claims to follow. She also denigrates every victim and survivor of the attacks and does me and every other Muslim a grave dishonor.

And while Omar relishes in flaunting her Muslim identity, she categorically fails in her Islamic duty. Islam is very clear in assigning responsibility for wrongdoing. Each Muslim has a clear-cut duty to himself or herself, to God and to society.

In fact, the holy texts of Islam emphasize that one's greatest allegiance should be to justice – even if doing so demands superseding family and coreligionist ties.

"Be strict in observing justice, and be witness for Allah, even though it be against yourselves or against your parents or kindred," the Koran says in Chapter 4, Verse 36. Omar fails on every count when her remarks trivializing the Sept. 11 attacks are seen in the light of this verse.

There is no question that the Sept. 11 attacks were an act of war launched through evolutionary Islamist jihadism, which has since become the hallmark of radical Islam.

Radical Islam – also known as Islamism – is a deviant, fictional and extreme distortion of true Islam, perpetrated by Islamist Muslims who use it to justify hatred and lethal violence that in reality have nothing to do with Islam.

Omar should be honest. There is no escaping the fact that the atrocities of 9/11 were not simply committed by “some people.” Islamist jihadists were responsible and they came from within the Muslim fold.

The vast majority of the world’s Muslims reject the cult or murder and death embraced by the hijackers of our beautiful religion, and in fact, many Muslims continue to die at the hands of Islamist jihadism. We each bear a responsibility to expose it.

Finally, let me set the record straight on Omar’s frequent complaints about how she and other Muslims are being persecuted and discriminated against in the United States today.

As a Muslim woman of color and immigrant – just like Omar – it’s logical to assume that if there was pervasive anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States I would be aware of it.

But in fact, Muslims have not experienced a contraction of civil rights in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks. We continue to have the same rights as all other Americans.

Rather than being second-class citizens, Muslims born in America and immigrating here legally have full citizenship open to us. We are all allowed to both be and feel fully American and recognized as such, unlike the way many Muslims tell me they feel in European nations.

The greatest obscenity in the lie that Omar pedals is that she – along with millions of other Muslims in America – is somehow victimized. Do not believe this.

Muslims in America are mainstream and most are middle-class. Some of us are even wealthy. Many of us are highly educated, upwardly mobile and among the fastest immigrants to climb the economic ladder and earn six-figure incomes. This is in stark contrast to Muslims in Europe, where Muslims are much less affluent than the general population.

The myth of Muslim victimhood is an Islamist one. It is completely false in the setting of Islam in America and in comparison to Islam in the wider Muslim-majority world.

For me, condemning Omar’s trivialization of the Sept. 11 mass murders is an act of being fully American, being a physician advocate for my 9/11 survivor patients and their families, and at the same time – keeping in line with Islam’s clear teachings – being fully Muslim.

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Omar’s words are a grotesque injustice against people who have already experienced diabolic injustice.

I thank God every day that I was able to immigrate to the United States of America, where I am now a proud citizen in a country I love and where I enjoy the blessings of  American liberty and protection of my rights under the U.S. Constitution. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear Rep. Ilhan Omar express these same sentiments?  Don’t expect it anytime soon.

A Clear Succinct Muslim Voice And It Definitely Is Not Omar!

Muslim CNN Guest Takes Stand for Trump, Trashes Islamophobia Talks: ‘The President Is Beloved’

By Jack Davis 
Published March 18, 2019 at 1:10pm

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During a CNN interview in which the host wanted to talk about President Donald Trump’s potential connections to last week’s New Zealand mosque massacre, a Muslim physician noted that Trump is “beloved” in the Muslim world.

Qanta Ahmed, a doctor and an associate professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, appeared on CNN Saturday as the network reacted to Friday’s terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.

During her interview, CNN host Fredericka Whitfield played video of Trump on Friday using the word “invasion” in connection with the issue of illegal immigration on the southern border. The word was also used in a manifesto issued by the suspected gunman in the attack. Trump was also mentioned in the document.

The president and the White House condemned the attack.

Although admitting the word choice was “poor” and the timing “much worse,” Ahmed encouraged Whitfield to look at the big picture.

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“There is nothing — the president has no responsibility if a fanatic mentions him in a manifesto. A fanatic could equally mention me. So, I don’t think that is his responsibility,” she said, adding she would like to see Trump condemn all forms of “lethal bigotry.”

“And one thing the viewers should know, this president and this administration is often castigated as Islamophobic, but I move in the Muslim word, in Egypt, in Oman, in Jordan, in Iraqi Kurdistan where this president is beloved,” she said.

Support for Trump and his party has been strong for many years, she said.

“This president and the Republican Party going back to George Bush is very dearly held,” she said.

“Today is the anniversary of … the massacre of 180,000 Kurds at the hands of Saddam Hussein. That only change would because of a Republican president. So, it is very important not to lose so much perspective that we start believing our entire government is Islamophobic. That is not the case,” she said.

Ahmed also said the word “Islamophobia” is often used incorrectly.

“Islamophobia actually means the refusal to scrutinize or examine Islam or Islamism, Islamist institutions,” she said.

“So we must distinguish lethal, diabolical, anti-Muslim xenophobia as is happening in Christchurch from Islamophobia. Why should we do that? Because, if we do not, we empower Islamists who wish to propagate the myth, the same myth that the white supremacists gunman wants us to believe that we are under siege in the secular world, that we are victims in the West,” she said.

Ahmed said the New Zealand attack needs to be seen at a human level.

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“Clearly, these Muslims were victims. Clearly, they were appalling and innocent tragedies which the decency and nobility of New Zealand is coping with now,” she said.

Is it nice to hear a different Muslim perspective for once?

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She also said that the video recorded of the attack, which was live-streamed to Facebook, could be a powerful weapon.

“This is an appalling recruiting video for Jihadists, but worse, this is a seed to tell people, tell the frightened public that we are going to fragment, that we are going to divide and our magnificent societies like we have here in the United States, or we have in New Zealand, or in my native Britain, we cannot allow these kinds of splits to occur in society because the entire intent of the perpetrator — in this case a white supremacist/nationalist — in my opinion, international terrorist, is to separate us,” she said.

During her interview, she also touched on the controversy that surrounded Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Muslim, over comments that were condemned as anti-Semitic.

“Anti-Semitism occurred in Congress, and the reaction was when there was outrage that this was somehow hate directed at a Muslim who is spewing Islamist ideology. So, we have to be extremely clear about the language, clear about the narrative …,” she said.

Moderate Muslim Get Slammed By Israeli Slamming TV Station

She’s a Muslim Who Went on TV to Talk Peace With Israel — but Watch What the Station Played Next to Her to Undermine Her Words

Jan. 11, 2015 6:19am Sharona Schwartz

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A Muslim doctor who is a vocal opponent of radical Islam and an ardent supporter of Israel is blasting an Australian television program for plastering an interview segment in which she appeared with images depicting Israeli military strikes on Gaza even though the subject of her interview was not about the summer conflict.

This, as one of the interviewers compared radical Islamism to what he called “extreme fundamentalist Christianity” in southern U.S. states which he alleged seeks to “stamp out Judaism and other forms of religion.”

Qanta Ahmed, a sleep disorders specialist who is currently involved in an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence project, this weekend described her experience back in November when she was interviewed by Australia’s Weekend Sunrise program, calling it “a Muslim’s ambush.”

During the interview segment on Australia’s Channel 7, Ahmed described Project Rozana which supports the efforts of Israel’s Hadassah Hospital to train predominantly Palestinian Muslim physicians from the West Bank.

“As an ambassador for the Project, I was lock step with my ideals both as a physician and as an observing Muslim opposed to virulently anti-Semitic Islamism,” Ahmed wrote on the British website the Spectator.

When she later saw the interview, Ahmed wrote, “The shock was physical as I witnessed my exploitation. At each description of the pluralism and egalitarianism I had witnessed in Israeli medicine, the screen split to show the rubble of decimated North Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war, or the launching of an Iron Dome interception missile. Then the screen split to the Security Wall, shown from the Palestinian, not Israeli side.”

While Ahmed discussed Israeli medical efforts to train Palestinian doctors, video showed aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. (Screenshot: Weekend Sunrise)

The images included a close-up of a stroller, undamaged despite the surrounding destruction (Screenshot: Weekend Sunrise)

“Mortally wounded Palestinian children, injured in conflict were broadcast liberally. The war footage had clearly been assembled in advance of my live interview without prior knowledge of what I would say. In an unseen control room, to the producers’ signal, as I responded with words like ‘coexistence’, ‘integration’ or ‘pluralism’, a technician pulled the trigger and rolled the stock ‘Israel as a terrorist state’ footage; detonating my truthful and universal message. I had been reduced to an instrument of rank media opportunism,” Ahmed wrote.

A review of the video also revealed one of the images wallpapered in the split screen next to Ahmed showed the stridently anti-Israel doctor Mads Gilbert in a Gaza hospital. This same doctor shortly after the 9/11 attacks told a Norwegian newspaper that he supported a terrorist attack on the U.S.

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, a vocal critic of Israel who once supported terrorist attacks on the U.S., also appeared in the video wallpaper next to Ahmed. (Screenshot: Weekend Sunrise)

Ahmed who calls herself a Zionist who supports Israel as the home of the Jewish people told the show, “All of medicine and science in Israel is fully expressing coexistence collaboration. It’s normal for Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish faculty to be working together and people of Palestinian origin to be working together, but the outside world whether it’s the United States or Australia often doesn’t recognize that.”

One of the show’s hosts, Andrew O’Keefe, tried to temper Ahmed’s argument by comparing Israel with the Palestinians and likening the dangers of radical Islam with other religions, including Christianity as practiced in the U.S. South. (Note: the interview took place before both the France terror attacks and the Sydney café hostage-taking).

Ahmed described the global dangers of Islamism, but images showed a bomb exploding this summer in Gaza, when Israel itself was fighting the radical Islamists of Hamas. (Screenshot: Weekend Sunrise)

O’Keefe told Ahmed that she has gotten criticism over “your insistence that the state of Israel is a refuge, the only real refuge from a potential genocide against Jews and the same I guess would have to be said for Palestine and the Palestinians.”

Ahmed corrected him, saying that she’s attacked predominantly because she’s an “anti-Islamist Muslim” who calls Islamism a totalitarian ideology.

The program host further said, “Any religious tradition is vulnerable to being hijacked for political or non-religious purposes to inculcate extremism. I think the debate here in Australia is centered around Islam, but meanwhile in Burma we have Buddhists running riot against Muslims attempting a genocide there; we have Hindu nationalism going crazy in parts of India; the southern states of America even now there is an extreme fundamentalist Christianity that’s sought to stamp out Judaism and other forms of religion. So I think it’s any religious tradition isn’t it?”

Ahmed said that while “any belief system can be galvanized into grounds for persecution … Islamism is extraordinary” due to the large number of its followers and powerful nations led by Islamist regimes.

“It’s much bigger than some of those things you’ve mentioned,” Ahmed said.

Now, Ahmed believes she “unwittingly collaborated in my own exploitation by the Australian broadcaster who chose to cast me not as an anti-Islamist Muslim physician volunteering in pursuit of coexistence but as a vapid tool serving the malignant media construct of a two-dimensional anti-Semitic caricature of Zionism.”

“This is neither journalism nor broadcasting; it’s pure pro-Hamas propaganda,” Ahmed wrote. “The producers hadn’t bothered to insert Hamas foot-soldiers which include recruited Palestinian children and youth who wage war on Israelis, nor reveal the damage wrought by its hundreds of rockets on Israeli civilians (of whom 23% are non Jewish – mostly Sunni Muslim), nor did Australians see the industrially rendered labyrinth of Hamas tunnels so central to the recent conflict.”

“Weekend Sunrise prostituted my goodwill in the service of personal or official anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas propaganda,” she wrote.

“This is what Israel faces, that which no other nation embattled with the lethal threat of Islamism wrestles: the battle over narrative. … Only Israel must be denigrated, reviled and excoriated in her efforts to secure citizens and territories from the ambitions of genocidal anti-Semitic Islamism,” Ahmed wrote.

“To be whored out as I strive as an ambassador for a philanthropic mission with universal reach, to be debased as an instrument despite my decades long authority as a physician and Muslim humanist is nothing but obscene,” she concluded.

TheBlaze reached out to the Australian station by telephone Sunday seeking comment, but an employee who answered would not provide any email or telephone contact information for those in position to comment.

–

Update: Later on Sunday, Weekend Sunrise hosts Andrew O’Keefe and Monique Wright penned a scathing response in the Spectator insisting they had not exploited Dr. Ahmed.

“To suggest that we came with any agenda, either designed to promote Hamas or to debase you, is insulting in the extreme,” they wrote. “To impugn our show and our staff publicly and in such a hostile and defamatory fashion based solely on your own preconceptions about supposed media bias is plainly unethical.”

O’Keefe and Wright wrote that the interview segment showed that they were “very sympathetic” to Ahmed’s argument on Islamism and expressed interest in both the Jewish-Muslim cooperation project at the hospital and her own presentation of Israel as a pluralistic nation.

“Your suggestions that you were somehow set up as a stooge, that you were in any way ‘ambushed’ or exploited, or that our producer Iman had anything other than your best interests at heart in constructing the segment, are completely false,” they wrote.

Of the Gaza footage, they offered a few explanations, including that some of it was shown without referencing the conflict.

As they described other parts of the footage, the television personalities suggested that Palestinian-Israeli tensions are a cause for Islamist hostility, though Ahmed made the argument that extreme Islamist ideology is innately anti-Semitic.

“Other parts of the footage was, perhaps, too bluntly illustrative of tensions between Muslim and Jewish populations in Israel and Palestine, on which so much of the Islamist hostility you discussed is based,” they wrote.

“And admittedly, we did use some footage that was inappropriate to what you were discussing at the exact moment it was played, but was very illustrative of what had been discussed prior to its display i.e. the grave injuries, both psychological and physical, sustained by children as a result of ongoing conflicts between Israel and Palestine,” O’Keefe and Wright wrote. “This was merely an issue of timing and was in no way intended to cast you as ‘tool serving the malignant media construct of a two-dimensional anti-Semitic caricature of Zionism.’”

“There was nothing ‘deliberate’ or ‘opportunistic’ about it,” they wrote, adding, “As a ‘veteran media commentator’ you must know that, from time to time, especially when the hosts veer off script to follow a particular train of thought of the guest, the wrong vision goes up at the wrong time. For that, I apologize. Sometimes these things happen on morning television.”

“We have here apologized for our minor mistake. You should seriously consider apologizing for your baseless and libelous comments against our staff,” the Australian hosts added.

Watch the segment here:

This story has been updated.