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Florida dentist wants his job back after ripping down Israeli hostage posters in the name of ‘peace’

October 21, 2023 | | Print Article

A South Florida dentist says his actions were taken “way out of context,” after a video emerged of him tearing down posters in Miami of missing Israeli hostages.

Dr. Ahmed ElKoussa was fired from CG Smile, a cosmetic dental group, after Stop Antisemitism, a bi-partisan “grassroots watchdog organization dedicated to exposing groups and individuals that espouse incitement towards the Jewish people and State and engage in antisemitic behaviors,” posted on X a video showing the dentist and another man, identified as Xave Ramoul, removing the flyers from street poles in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Juan Carlos Izquierdo, the owner of CG Smile, said his business faced “severe backlash” over ElKoussa’s actions. He immediately terminated the dentist’s employment.

“I believe it’s not right. It’s against our position on the entire situation,” Izquierdo told NBC6. “Later on, I got a call saying he wanted to explain and that after he explained, everything would be cleared, and I told him I don’t want to hear it.”

“We told the doctor, listen we’re terminating you,” he said. “We don’t want to have to deal with any of this.”

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(Video: YouTube)

On Thursday, ElKoussa, flanked by attorney Hassan Shibly, held a press conference.

“Unfortunately my video of four seconds got taken way out of context as well as the way that my former employer had portrayed it, that it’s an act of supporting terrorism,” ElKoussa told reporters. “It’s the very very very contrary, it’s to promote peace, it’s to deescalate the situation that we’re going through and make sure that our communities are safe.”

According to Shibly, ElKoussa “was horribly misrepresented by his employer and wrongfully terminated and has since received a tremendous amount of extremely hateful death threats and nasty and hateful messages that I really don’t think represent what this country should be about.”

ElKoussa, the lawyer explained, was motivated to remove the flyers by the news of the tragic death of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian Muslim child who was allegedly stabbed to death in Illinois by his family’s landlord, Joseph M. Czuba.

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ElKoussa, Shibly said, “feared” the posters in his Brickell neighborhood “may incite conflict, may incite hatred, and, out of an abundance of caution, he reached out to law enforcement and informed them that he feared these posters may promote tensions and conflict at a time when our country and our community needs peace and unity.”

(Video: YouTube)

It was the police, he said, who gave ElKoussa the option to remove these posters.

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The dentist was simply exercising “his right to do that,” Shibly said, “with the best intentions.”

“His personal opinion was that posters from either side may potentially incite conflict and he did not want there to be any conflict escalation in his local community,” Shibly told the New York Post on Wednesday. “And he was concerned that those posters could potentially trigger conflict — rightfully or wrongfully, he was concerned that they would trigger and escalate conflict.”

Melissa Fine
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