Omar Suleiman

What have we allowed to be done to them using our tax dollars?

in our name right so i think that we have to interrogate the political chaos that was caused not just not just free religion from the groups that were created but what was done to those countries and what continues to be done in many of these places yeah when um the the pride that people had about america where everybody came together after 9 11 and there was all the american flags

I mean, look,

You think about this, you know, if your grandparents were wiped out in a drone attack, your parents, your brothers, your sisters, all of your loved ones, and you're missing a leg and an eye, and the world does not take you into consideration, you'll never be seen or considered in the halls of Congress or discussed.

What are you going to grow up with, right?

But the thing is, is that we should not be speaking about this only from the standpoint of, oh, shoot, they're going to grow up and hate us.

we should be thinking about what was done to them and hate that, despise that, that it's ugly.

You see, when people carry out a terrorist attack, they're not considering the lives of the civilians in these places.

So those that perpetrate the 9-11 attacks are not seeing the thousands of people that they killed, the human beings, the lives, many of whom were Muslim, by the way.

Actually, no, one of them was a very active Muslim in Islamic circle of North America.

I mean, they didn't see those stories, right?

When you drop a bomb on this many people, when you drone people and you say, oops, collateral damage, we were looking for one person, killed 40 people, and there's no count, no names, nothing that can be recalled in the American memory.

That's a problem, a fundamental issue with how we treat the rest of the world, right?

So I'm an American.

I think that I'm responsible to the extent that I have to critique these policies and I have to try to challenge America to deal with the world differently.

And when I go overseas, when I'm around Muslims in the Muslim world, right?

In the Middle East and in the Muslim world,

I'm speaking as a Palestinian American Muslim who grew up in South Louisiana.

I've got a complex background here, right?

A lot of experiences here that I'm grateful for because they all contribute to who I am and what I know and what I've been, I think they're all enriching.