Qanta Ahmed, an Anglo-American physician and writer and an outspoken opponent of Islamism, recently received an award from an Israeli university. She talks about the nature of radical Islam, the failure of the United States to confront it properly, and her own experiences in Israel. (Interview by Dror Eydar):
When I heard President Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009, I thought it was a shame that a speech like this was not given by a Muslim leader in Cairo about the need for engagement with the U.S. Also, the prominence of the Palestinian issue on the president’s agenda annoys so many Muslims from other regions, like from Bangladesh. There are over a billion Muslims who do not live in the Middle East and do not list the Palestinian issue as their top priority. Yet I do not wish the Palestinians ill. I am as pro-Palestinian as I am pro-Zionist. . . .
I found myself on one of my visits to Israel . . . in an elevator at Hadassah [hospital in Jerusalem]. I was with a very busy doctor, and I looked around the small, packed elevator. What I saw around me was a Muslim lady in a hijab, next to her a man who looked as if he was from the 18th century—with a striped jacket, white socks, and a special hat—and next to him . . . a man with peyot. In front of me was the busy modern-Orthodox doctor. I, the Muslim, am the one who looks secular.
And I realized that all my worlds—the people I used to treat [when I worked] in Saudi Arabia, the Orthodox patients and doctors I encounter in New York, my modern-Orthodox friends, Israelis living in America—all of my worlds collided in this elevator. And they don’t collide anywhere else. It is little moments like that in which you can’t help becoming a Zionist.
Read more on Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=26485