It’s not the YouTube video of Dr. Esam Omeish supporting “the Jihad way” at a rally or his views on Israel that disqualify him from serving on Virginia’s Commission on Immigration. It’s the company he keeps. The head of surgery at INOVA Alexandria Hospital is also president of the Virginia-based Muslim American Society, which claims to be the largest grassroots Islamic organization in the United States. It was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group at the heart of the worldwide Jihadist movement.
In 2003, 23-year-old Ahmed Abu-Ali, an American-born valedictorian of Alexandria’s Islamic Saudi Academy, was arrested in Saudi Arabia and accused of being part of the al Faq’asi terrorist cell that bombed a compound in Riyadh, killing 39 people — including nine Americans. Omeish’s group organized a rally to defend him. Last year, Abu-Ali was sentenced to 30 years in prison for providing material assistance to al Qaeda.
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Omeish is also on the board of the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, which was infiltrated by Mapping Sharia project leader Dave Gaubatz. Posing as new recruits, Gaubatz and his team were given materials advocating Jihadist violence directed against the U.S. Gaubatz told The Examiner that the “Muslims on our team brought the center to our attention. Material I’ve obtained there in over 300 hours specifically advocates the overthrow of the U.S.”
And according to Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock, the legislator who first alerted Gov. Tim Kaine to Omeish’s links to terrorist groups, the doctor has also been invited to appear as a co-lecturer with Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was a character witness for “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, now serving a life sentence as a co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. If Omeish, a graduate of Georgetown Medical School, is indeed a moderate Muslim who does not condone violence, as he asserted at a news conference last week, why is he hanging around with people who do?
When the videotapes surfaced, Kaine asked the doctor to resign, but the still-unanswered question is why Omeish was appointed in the first place. Secretary of the Commonwealth Kate Hanley, whose office is supposed to check the backgrounds of 3,000 prospective gubernatorial appointees, refused to say who recommended Omeish for the 20-member panel tasked with analyzing the impact of legal and illegal immigration on the commonwealth. That’s not good enough. If Kaine wants Virginians to take the recommendations of this panel seriously, he’ll have to make a full and complete disclosure of all remaining appointees — and their sponsors.
