I’m a Muslim doctor who treats 9/11 victims — – Latest News
I’m an observing Muslim lady — British by delivery, American by privilege — who witnessed 9/11 in actual time from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the place I used to be treating critically unwell sufferers.
That was my introduction to radical Islam — a profound distortion of my religion.
Today, as a doctor who treats 9/11 first responders and survivors as a consulting sleep specialist to the Federal World Trade Center Health Program, I see the long-term impacts of that horrific day up close.
So it outraged me deeply to listen to 9/11 vilified by far-left Democratic Twitch mouthpiece Hasan Piker, who has casually declared that “America deserved 9/11.”
And whereas he’s tried to backtrack on his feedback simply in time for the twenty fifth anniversary of these heinous assaults, as a Muslim who rejects Islamism I need to communicate out in opposition to his venom.
Witnessing 9/11 launched my 25-year mental and international odyssey to know radical Islam and its influence — on each its terror victims and on these seduced by highly effective Islamist ideology.
It’s nonetheless tough to grasp the true extent of 9/11’s toll.
We all know that 2,977 people have been killed within the assaults, together with 2,753 on the World Trade Center in New York, 184 on the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and 40 on Flight 93 in Shanksville, Penn.
It was the best loss of life on American soil since Pearl Harbor, an unmistakable act of warfare.
Yet more than 9,200 people have since died of World Trade Center-related illnesses — over 3 times the quantity misplaced within the terror assaults themselves.
They have been killed by sicknesses associated to toxins launched in the towers’ destruction — lung illness, prostate most cancers, thyroid most cancers, kidney cancers and melanoma.
Many more deaths could also be but to come back: 52,000 people at the moment are licensed with WTC-related cancers.
Meanwhile, tens of 1000’s of survivors undergo every day with illnesses of the sinuses, extreme gastroesophageal reflux, post-traumatic stress dysfunction, obstructive sleep apnea, despair, nervousness and more.
By final month, more than 154,700 people have been enrolled within the World Trade Center Health Program.
My sufferers sometimes have at the least three WTC-related diagnoses by the time they see me.
Yet many first responders and survivors don’t come ahead, even 25 years later.
I see it as a heartbreaking kind of survivor guilt: My sufferers inform me how reluctant they really feel to impose on the federal health program — that “others” are in higher need, are someway more deserving.
Add them up, and the numbers are astounding: The 145,000 people nonetheless residing with WTC-related sicknesses, the relations who help look after them, the households grieving the three,000 misplaced on 9/11 and the 9,200 who have died since — all of them are gravely wounded by the mean-spirited hate of Piker and his echo chamber.
Piker’s vile trivialization additionally defiles hundreds of thousands of Muslims around the globe who reject Islamist ideology.
Since 9/11, I’ve traveled to Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and elsewhere on a quest to know this deadly mindset.
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our every day Post Opinion e-newsletter!
Thanks for signing up!
I’ve met with its victims and generally with its former perpetrators — former baby jihadists struggling to rehabilitate; males, ladies, girls and boys violated by ISIS, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Taliban; households left fatherless and brotherless as they lose a number of boys and males to jihad.
I’ve met, too, with Muslim troopers and Muslim commanders who ferociously struggle the armies of terror, defending each their international locations and our shared religion from Islamism.
Twenty-five years on from 9/11, American politics is commodified into soundbites.
A supercharged algorithmic tyranny rewards narcissism and contempt, spreading dangerous concepts — that 9/11 was perversely “deserved,” for instance — ever sooner.
American Muslims will not be immune to those currents; certainly, far-left extremism and Islamism goal us particularly.
American-born Muslims get pleasure from some of essentially the most outstanding benefits any society can offer wherever on the planet: the liberty to observe our religion brazenly and construct our lives in security.
Yet far too many of us reply to these benefits not with deepening patriotism, however with a sense of embittered, politicized victimhood — a sentiment that’s solely grown since Oct. 7, 2023.
Piker studies he’s a “cultural” Muslim; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Shia Muslim, took his oath of workplace on the Quran.
Both, irrespective of observance, wield Muslim id as a potent mobilizer of political victimhood — and as a perverse badge of honor within the service of an anti-establishment, anti-American rallying cry.
I appeal to them, and to all American Muslims, to show away from this malignant hatred that’s corroding our societal values.
This nation, the survivors and responders of 9/11 and America’s Muslims all deserve higher than an Islamism that seeks to demean that world-shattering day.
Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, is a senior fellow at Independent Women and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. X: @MissDiagnosis
