You could feel the excitement in the air. To finally have a moderate Muslim leader, a woman to boot, wrapped in an American flag appearing on Fox News with Megan Kelly talking about her love for this country and what a loyal citizen she is.
This leader even started a Republican Muslim Coalition, a Republican Party’s answer to prayer, and even called Donald Trump to join her at any mosque of his choosing on a Friday afternoon to see for himself how patriotic the American Muslim community is.
Wow, finally what everyone has waited for is becoming reality…. Saba Ahmed has emerged to save the day.
But who is Saba Ahmed – really?
She is a former Democratic candidate for Congress who ran in 2012 on a platform that she would bring all U.S. soldiers home from the Middle East and Afghanistan, because in her view they do not need to be there.
She got less than a third of a percent of the vote and then switched to the Republican party, claiming it better represented her pro-life, pro-business, pro-traditional family values, and pro-defense, pro-trade, pro-business positions. If that is the case, it leads one to ask what she was doing with the Democrats in the first place.
Saba Ahmed, who claims to be such a patriotic American wrapped in our flag, would do well to explain why she was so chummy with Mohammed Mohamud, the Portland “Christmas Tree Bomber,” so much so that she showed up at his trial to support him and was thrown out of one of his court hearings for contempt.
Saba Ahmed’s true agenda can be found in past comments she made about Islamic terrorists’ “anti-Islamic actions” and then compared them to the Christian “terrorists” of the CIA and the American military who she says also have innocent blood on their hands.
Ahmed, who has a law degree and works for the U.S. Patent Office, apparently can’t distinguish between terrorism based on religious belief, as was the case with the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, and US government agencies and armed forces that have no religious affiliation. The fact that she can conflate the two, and somehow label our country’s efforts to defend itself “terrorist actions” worthy of comparison with Islamic radicals shows her real intent.
She once told Glenn Beck, Koran in hand, that her Islamic faith is all she has and refused to denounce the brutal, sexist aspects of Sharia law, saying all things are a mixture of good and bad. Party affiliation for Ahmed appears secondary to an Islamist, pro-Sharia, anti-U.S. agenda.
Despite her claims of being a Republican, she marched with Occupy Portland, which had a very strong anti-Israel platform. She spoke at one of their rallies and said that the Muslim world hates the US because of its policies and that it is the US that must change. She has been banned from the Oregon Tea Party and Washington County Republicans for false accusations and fabricating death threats she claimed came from Tea Party members, but which originated from her.
I had my own very highly visible confrontation with Ahmed in Washington DC last year. At a meeting at the Heritage Foundation discussing the Benghazi attacks she posed as an innocent student wanting to know why we were casting all Muslims in a negative light. None of us there had done any such thing or even brought up the discussion about Muslims and radicalism. My response to her was posted on YouTube and has gotten almost 14 million views.
What we have in Saba Ahmed is an example of the highest level of sophisticated deception by an Islamist trying to insert themselves into the national security discussion.
And she isn’t the first one…
It should be noted that figures such as Abdurahman M. Alamoudi and Anwar al-Awlaki initially appeared on the American scene as “moderate Muslims” invited to speak at the White House and the Pentagon with friends on the highest levels – President Bush and President Clinton in the case of Alamoudi – before their terrorist ties were eventually revealed. Alamoudi is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence and Al-Awlaki is dead – assassinated by our own government.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is another example of what appears to be a moderate Muslim group speaking on behalf of the Muslim Community despite the fact that a number of their leaders and members have been arrested, imprisoned, exiled and charged with terrorism related charges.
On the one hand CAIR said they were against all forms of unjustified violence, but refused to denounce Bin Laden by name. Once their real agenda was exposed on numerous occasions, it was always the same: US actions and policy in the Middle East triggered the 9/11 attacks. In order to prevent further attacks, their proposed solution was to remove US soldiers from the Middle East, cease US support of Israel, and allow the Palestinians free reign to destroy the Jewish homeland. In other words, we’re not really sorry about 9/11, Madrid, London, Paris x 2, Sydney, San Bernardino, and on and on. We’re not really sorry, because really, you brought this on yourselves.
Don’t be fooled, America. Thankfully, Donald Trump is much too clever to fall for Saba Ahmed’s facade and her manipulation. Hopefully, Fox News and those who give her a platform will wake up as well to her charade.
We must recognize figures like Saba Ahmed for what they are: Islamists who spout patriotic platitudes, but who justify acts of Islamic terrorism, and whose intent is nothing less than a worldwide caliphate that would undo America from within, with Sharia formally established as the standard for Muslims. With “friends” like this, who needs enemies?
Brigitte Gabriel is a terrorism analyst and a two times NYT bestselling author of Because They Hate and They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It. She is the Founder and President of ACT! for America, www.actforamerica.org, the largest national security grassroots organization in the US dedicated to combating terrorism.