Muslim 9/11 First Responder Gets New York City Street Named After Him

The New York Daily News reported Monday that “a police cadet who died helping World Trade Center victims on 9/11 was honored Monday at a Queens street renaming — 13 years after being accused of involvement in the attacks. Residents and elected officials came together to formally rename 204th St. at 35th Ave. ‘Salman Hamdani Way’ after Mohammed Salman Hamdani, the son of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan who lived a block from the Bayside street.”

Endless concessions and accommodations to Islamic demands only give way to more. Not to rain on anyone’s proselytizing parade, but why this guy? Why does this first responder get a street named after him? Because he’s a Muslim? What about the other hundreds of first responders who died that day? Why don’t they have streets named after them? 

Is it because Mohammed Salman Hamdani is a unicorn? Is it really so extraordinary that a Muslim helped people that he gets singled out? Why is his sacrifice greater than that of all the other first responders who were killed?

Apparently New York City thinks so. And so does the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In their press release about the street renaming, they managed both to crow and to play the victim card. The Board President of CAIR’s New York chapter, Ryan Mahoney (either a convert to Islam or a useful idiot for this Hamas group), said: “Today, CAIR-NY commends the city council for honoring a true American hero, Salman Hamdani, who gave his life as a first responder on 9/11. This street naming will serve as a reminder of courage and sacrifice to the residents and visitors of Bayside for years to come as well as a testament that individuals and communities of all ethnic and religious backgrounds are united in the cause of service to humanity.”

That wasn’t so bad, but then CAIR went on to whine: “In 2012, Hamdani was not included in the list of fallen police officers in the NYPD’s official 9/11 memorial and in the list of 441 first responders on the National September 11 Memorial.” 

CAIR doesn’t mention the fact that, as journalist Matthew Shaffer states, “six weeks after the September 11 attacks — before Hamdani’s remains were identified, which Ellison implies to be the turning point of public perception — Congress signed the PATRIOT Act into law with this line included: ‘Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.’ That is, Hamdani was actually singled out for particular high honors among the thousands of victims of the September 11 attacks.”

It is odd that CAIR didn’t repeat the Daily News‘s victimhood claim that Hamdani was “accused of involvement in the attacks” by anonymous police sources cited in early news reports. Muslim Representative Keith Ellison made a travesty of Rep. Peter King’s counter-terror hearings in 2011 by bursting into crocodile tears while telling the story of how Hamdani was accused of being one of the jihad attackers when he was missing in the days after 9/11, when actually he had been killed helping people at the scene. 

But maybe that was too much even for CAIR, since it is so far from the truth. Says Shaffer: “There’s little evidence of the ‘rumors’ of which Ellison speaks, either. Poke around yourself. Go to Google and search for Mohammed Salman Hamdani’s name, using various time frames from before today’s hearings (say, in the week after the September 11 attack). You’ll discover two discordant sets of returns: none for sites and news reports accusing Hamdani of being a terrorist, and many thousands of pages honoring him as a hero while claiming that he was ‘widely accused’ of being a terrorist.”

Outrageous.

How many people did Salman Hamdani save? He responded to an emergency. That was his job. Just like the other 2993 victims who went to work that day. They deserve streets named after them, too.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here.