By Abdul Masih —
Pakistani-born Dr. Qanta Ahmed says there’s no apartheid in Israel, but there is in Muslim Saudi Arabia.
“I see no barrier to academic and thereby economic opportunities to people in Israel based on their religion based on their ethnicity or based on their gender,” Ahmed says. “I was a woman who was working with a profession making a big income in Saudi Arabia, but I was designated a legal minor. I was denied the right of movement literally in a car from my home to my work and also literally meaning not being able to enter or exit the country without a symbolic male guardian.”
As a physician specializing in sleep disorder, Dr. Ahmed has worked both in Israel and Saudi Arabia, and she says the Israel treats Muslims with greater liberty than Saudi Arabia treats women.
As a child of Pakistani immigrant parents, she grew up in London and graduated from the University of Nottingham. After completing medical training in New York City in 1992, she accepted work in Saudi Arabia, which imposed such sharia law as “women are not allowed to go around in public without a male guardian.”
She qualifies her experience in Saudi Arabia as “clear evidence of apartheid.”
Of all Israeli citizens, 23% are Arab and those numbers are reflected undiminished in Technion-Israel Institute of Science and Technology in Haifa, Israel, of which she is an honorary fellow, she says. But in the medical field, of 130 students, 50 were Arabs (mostly Muslim Arabs), she says.
Meanwhile, if you look at “apartheid” scenarios in her own native land, in Pakistan, Christians are a “very beleaguered group,” as are “minority Muslims” (Shia) which are denied vote and electoral representation, she says.
“The one and only Christian cabinet minister in Pakistan was executed for attempting to protest the blasphemy laws,” she says.
Why are there no protests against Saudi or Pakistani aparthied?
“I think there is a deep-rooted antisemitism which is greatly fueled by Islamist ideology,” Dr. Ahmed says. “Hamas and Hezbollah clearly explicitly identify the Jew or Judaism as a a an a cosmic enemy. Therefore it becomes a sacrament to persecute the Jew, to eradicate the Jewish state.
“There’s an embrace by the Left… of an understanding of colonialism in a way that projects white supremacist colonialism on the Israeli state and therefore rejecting that is somehow upholding democratic and pluralist values,” she adds. “It’s an incredibly ignorant marriage of Left and Islamism.”
Dr. Ahmed is herself an orthodox Muslim but rejects Islamism. She also rejects the idea that any critique of Islam is necessarily “Islamophobic.” While the attack on the Christchurch mosque is regrettable, the widespread application of the term “Islamophobia” has been exploited by Islamists as a “shield for jihadis,” she says.
Dr. Ahmed describes herself as an “accidental Zionist.” In other words, she came upon it in life. She opposes calls for the elimination of Israel.
“Eretz (The land of) Yisrael is a vital shelter, an only shelter, from lethal, genocidal anti-Semitism,” Ahmed affirms. “If we care for wider humanity at all, we must all be ‘accidental’ Zionists and want for the Jews, for the Israelis, what each Muslim already has for themselves: a future, a nation and a faith, secured.”
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