Dinner With Saba

saba-ahmedAnother Ramadan has past, but not without personal opportunity to examine a recent Muslim media darling, Saba Ahmed.  The 9/11 Truther and other radical beliefs expressed by Ahmed and her associates during a recent interview make her aspirations of being the “head of the Muslim peace movement” not worthy of further consideration.

After achieving national notoriety with Brigitte Gabriel at the Heritage Foundation and in two subsequent Fox News appearances, further attention for Ahmed, such as a Nation interview, followed.  Her lobbying firm “monitor[s] all congressional hearings related to national security,” Ahmed explained, “primarily targeting” everything thereby that “has to do with Islamists.” According to Ahmed, using this word “to define ‘terrorist’” contradicts Qur’an 2:256’s message that “there is no compulsion in religion.”

Ahmed’s recurring requests for interaction with me resulted in a July 17 invitation to an Iftar hosted by Make Space mosque, a “non-judgmental community” with a “strong focus on youth and young professionals.”  Make Space emphasizes “universal as well as Islamic values of compassion, cooperation and service” as opposed to a “counter-productive focus on controversial issues” in Islam.  At Alexandria, Virginia’s Dunya Restaurant I removed my shoes and entered to be met by mosque volunteers, including a South Asian-looking, unveiled American woman wearing business slacks and blazer.

Literature for Guidance Residential, the “Leader in Islamic home financing” for American interest-free “Home Ownership the Sharia Way,” filled a table near the entrance.  A postcard featuring Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani, Guidance Residential’s Sharia Board Chairman, caught the eye.  A member of Pakistan’s Supreme Court since 1982, Usami played a key role in introducing sharia laws on blasphemy, corporal punishments, and other matters during Zia al-Haq’s dictatorship.  The Muslim 500:  The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims 2013-2014 edition ranks Usami 25th, a “leading scholar of Islamic jurisprudence” and “intellectual leader” of the Deobandi movement that gave rise to the Taliban.

Contrasting with laywoman Ahmed, Usami’s 2002 book Islam and Modernism does “not make excuses” for saying that the “command of jihad remains till the last day” and “killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay Jizyah after they are humbled.”  During jihad the “clear manifest truth is that taking slaves is permissible,” Usami’s Islamic slavery apologetic argues.  “Fiercely anti-American” according to Investor’s Business Daily, Usmani has urged Muslim support for fighting American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Islamic teaching, however, “proves the impermissibility of playing backgammon,” another Usami article declares.

Ahmed arrived shortly after me and explained to an inquiring Make Space organizer her “Dawah” or Islamic propagation with me.  Ahmed introduced in turn her friend Wejdan Alharbi, a fellow American University law student from Saudi Arabia.  While Ahmed wore her usual modest hijab attire of slacks, long sleeves, and veil, Alharbi additionally wore the niqab face covering, leaving only eyes through a slit and glasses visible.  (Alharbi thus emulated Aisha, the “most beloved wife” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, she later explained.)  After much introductory handshaking, I mistakenly offered my hand to Alharbi, who observed the strict Muslim norm of not touching an unrelated male.

Following a brief prayer with genders divided across the banquet hall, Ahmed, Alharbi, and I entered the buffet line and enjoined the Iftar on the floor of the designated family area.  Conversation during and after dinner roamed over various topics, but Ahmed’s oft-invoked “root causes of terrorism” became the focus.

“Stop blaming the religion,” Ahmed demanded with respect to associations of Islam with aggression and atrocities.  “Terrorism has no place in Islam” with its “strict rules of war,” Ahmed contended, making groups like the Islamic State “completely un-Islamic.”  “Not Islam,” but “grievances all around” motivated Muslims to act violently.  Ahmed, however, ignored Islamic teachings condemning all non-Muslims in jihads waged by Muslims like Usmani as military targets.

Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks, though, climaxed the evening’s discussion.  “Everyone outside the United States” knows that 9/11 is “just made…up,” Ahmed argued, contradicting her 2011 televised appreciation for the killing of the “criminal” Osama bin Laden.  America “just needed a stimulus” for justifying conquests of mineral resources in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, Ahmed contended.  Today “we have to keep on killing people” as Americans “play with joy sticks” in drone strikes.

“Nobody wants to find out the truth” on 9/11 and risk being tarred as a “truther,” Ahmed claimed. Ahmed speculated about discredited theories concerning a controlled demolition of World Trade Center’s Building Seven.   Wreckage at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, appeared to Ahmed too insignificant to result from plane crashes, she argued while poring over photos on her smartphone.  How could a Saudi hijacker’s passport on display at Washington, DC’s Newsuem survive an airplane crash, Ahmed likewise doubted in questioning Saudi hijacker involvement in 9/11?

“I don’t know what hit the Pentagon,” Ahmed responded to questioning. What about my law school professor, Robert A. Youmans, who saw through his Navy Annex office window a low-flying airliner seconds before it rammed into the Pentagon on 9/11?  A drone airliner-look-a-like, Ahmed suggested.

The hour getting late, Ahmed kindly offered me a ride to a metro station and the three of us entered her Mercedes-Benz C230.   Asked by Ahmed, I affirmed that I had once read the Qur’an as she played an Arabic singing of its sura 36, the “Heart of the Qur’an.”  This sura, I later analyzed, exalts the “straight path” of “Prophet Muhammad” and the “wise Qur’an” while warning unfaithful of the “Hellfire which you were promised…for what you used to deny.”

Political scientist Hannah Arendt famously described the “banality of evil” during her coverage of Israel’s 1961-1962 trial of Nazi genocide organizer Adolf Eichmann.  This banality can include the denial of Ahmed, an individual whose devotion to Islam’s “straight path” precluded reflection upon sources of evil within the faith.  Yet, as Gabriel discussed at Heritage, defeating tyranny amidst any group, Germans, Muslims, or otherwise, demands that the majority define and defend a clear conviction of human dignity against internal enemies.  Ahmed, though, dismissed at the Iftar any analogies in this regard with totalitarianisms past as inapplicable to Muslims, seen by her never as perpetrators, but only as suffering victims driven to extremes.  Thus foreign military interventions in Muslim countries by America and others can only result from nefarious motives, not legitimate concerns with the Islamic world’s incessant instabilities and dangers.

Subsequent Ahmed Facebook postings confirmed her views of Islamic innocence.  Historically “Israel opposed all UN efforts to create two states” and perpetrated “aggressive killings,” she complained.  Additionally, Israel has “stolen lands over the last several decades” depicted in a posted map for which “there is no Jewish claim,” Ahmed proclaimed.  Jews “were the chosen people until they disobeyed God and were punished by leaving their lands.”  “I see now you hate the Jewish people,” a “saddened” person who had hoped Ahmed “were more moderate” responded.

Ahmed’s outlook had preoccupied me during the ride as the Pentagon and its 9/11 memorial appeared alongside the freeway in a yellowish glow of exterior lights.  Among 184 dead from that fateful day there honored are 59 from the airliner Al Qaeda crashed into the Pentagon, deaths which Ahmed cannot explain.  The Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville honoring the civilian heroes who lost their lives in a victory over Al Qaeda is also presumably fraudulent for Ahmed as she still searches O.J. Simpson-like for 9/11’s real killers.  Ahmed’s fantasies of being a Muslim peace leader and national security expert notwithstanding, her 15 minutes of fame should end.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

  • Docs357

    These people know know thing of peace they start to kill each other when they run out others to kill. They are raised on hate murder and how wonderful it is to did for the cause . Pulley satanic they know nothing of love of family everything in there sick world is jihad. Two of them married for love there families beheaded them sad but trure

    • bullet2354

      Agreed.

      It is a cult of death and violence.

  • johnlac

    While not every Muslim is a psychopathic killer and oppressor of women, the religion attracts the most violent, stupid, and misogynistic males. Why is Islam the only religion that justifies killing non-believers and endorses slavery? If Islam was just starting out, it would be condemned by many countries as a death cult. Which it is.

    • Jay

      Women too. Saba Ahmed featured in this article is a woman. Never feel sorry for hijabed or niqabed Muslim women. They are not victims but fanatics.

    • Joseph Flannagan

      Not only slavery but FGM , wife beating , child marriage , forced marriage , polygamy , beheading , limb amputations and the killing of adulterers , homosexuals and apostates. I have made this point many times as virtually EVERY aspect of islamic practise and culture is ILLEGAL in every civilised country so WHY is islam still tolerated and even encouraged by our politicians , media and the useful idiots on the left who are determined to enable and support this barbarity despite all the evidence and all the indications that it is incompatible with any modern , civilised society.

  • kilfincelt

    We have to remember that their freedom fighter is our Islamic terrorist. Furthermore, the line in the Qur’an about there being “no compulsion in religion” is abrogated later by other verses that demand that infidels convert, pay the jizya or die. In addition, the Qur’an sanctions deliberate lying to further the goals of spreading Islam.

    Recently, a friend of mine told me that she was given to understand that Muslims believed in the Ten Commandments. I told her no that was not correct. As an example, I cited the commandments that read: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy day’s might be long upon the earth which God giveth thee” and “Thou shalt not murder.” I then explained that if a parent converts to another religion such as Christianity then he or she is an apostate and can be killed. Of course, this violates two commandments. Virtually all the commandments have exceptions in Islam and especially the Golden Rule.

    • Habbgun

      I have to remember that line. Their freedom fighter is our terrorist. Beautiful.

      • Jay

        That line is usually reversed, and used to undermine people being terrorized and legitimize terrorists by changing them into something more noble like freedom fighters. It is a line I would reject because of its attempt to white wash terrorists as freedom fighters.

        • IslamDownpressesHumanity

          Islam has nothing to do w/freedom and neither do the muslimes fighting to impose it on the entire world.

    • IslamDownpressesHumanity

      The only “freedom” muslims fight for comes at the expense of anyone not-a-muslim.

      • Jay

        And it is not freedom but Islamic enslavement – infidels as slaves of Muslims, and Muslims as slaves of Islam.

  • El Cid

    The “problem” goes beyond the religion. the problem is total denial of responsibility brought on by an inability to admit any faults whatsoever, since this would bring shame on the group. No truth is possible, only conspiracy can explain the failure of the Arab word.

    They must find us Jews very perplexing as we openly argue about our responsibilities and culpability in public. We must appear subhuman to bring such shame to ourselves. How weak we must look. How could we be winning? Is it the Jinns?

    Shame based meets guilt based–no communication.

    • Ginger Li

      Actually, liberals have molded themselves upon the same approach as Muslims: never are they mistaken or responsible for their failures – and never do they admit anything.

  • ebonystone

    its [Islam's] “strict rules of war,”

    Just before a major battle with the army of the Persian Empire, the Moslem general pointed at the Persian army and addressed his troops: “There is the enemy! Kill him, and his house, his lands, his cattle, his women, and his children are YOURS.”

    That’s the Islamic rule of war.

  • Juan Pablo

    And something tells me the real “killers” in this case will end up either being Jews themselves or people controlled by Jews.

  • wileyvet

    Like all Muslims she has a mental problem, that closes the mind to reason and logic. Being a woman too, she must not only submit to Allah and his messenger, but also the cultural dictates that Islam imposes on women. They just need to get out of America and go live in a Sharia country and live Islamic life to the fullest.

    • IslamDownpressesHumanity

      Like any muslim, she must accept islam’s lies (about Jews, unbelievers, Christians etc.) as truth, otherwise her whole world unravels and her holey prophet is revealed as the Jew hating brigand, slaver, psychopath, narcissist, thief, liar and slaver he really was.

  • Americana

    Tell her to check out what survived from the Malaysian flight if she’s got doubts about how a Muslim hijacker’s passport ended up being ejected from one of the crashed airliners as it slammed into the World Trade Center towers.

    • Webb

      Tell her yerself, shitferbrains.

      • Americana

        If that’s what you’re eating for dinner, it’s really not nutritious brain food. Upgrade your thought process, try fish several times a week.

      • JIMJFOX

        Why this outburst??

        • IslamDownpressesHumanity

          Americana is an islamic-fascist propagandist/apologist.

          • Americana

            Not on your life. That comment of mine should indicate something about my intolerance of Muslim double-speak and scurrilous knowledge of current events and yet, to you, whose ears are attuned to only one band-width, it says nothing. You just don’t happen to appreciate historical accuracy for both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli impasse. A great many of you also insist someone follow a precise line of reasoning on most aspects of national policy and the margin for what is acceptable outside that narrow band of reasoning is virtually nonexistent.

          • JIMJFOX

            Please express yourself in easily understood ENGLISH.
            “how a Muslim hijacker’s passport ended up being ejected from one of the crashed airliners”

            What point RU making? That something survives an air disaster? Obviously. Your posts are both incomprehensible. Forget the ‘intellectual’ language.
            K.I.S.S.

          • Americana

            My language is pretty darn plain. There’s no need to reduce language to “things can survive an air disaster.” When this silly woman believes the entire 9/11 event was STAGED BY ISRAEL AND THE U.S., sometimes more descriptive details are better.

  • JIMJFOX

    To be fair, Islamic ‘morals’ spring from koran & the sunnah of the prophet; thus war, murder, decapitation of innocents, rape, torture, pedophilia etc are all halal. Because after all Muhammad is the perfect example to be followed by all muslims.

  • jewdog

    I’m glad you enjoyed dinner with Saba. And when it was over did you walk her to her spaceship?

    • Andrew E. Harrod

      A part of me wants to extradite her to Mars.

    • IslamDownpressesHumanity

      I figured he would’ve walked her to a flying buraq or perhaps carpet.

  • Dragomir Kollaric

    “no adult civilians in ISLAMIC JIHAD”

    09.3 Jihad is also (0: personally) obligatory for everyone (0: able to perform it,

    male or female,old or young)

    when the enemy has surrounded the Muslims (0:
    on every side, having entered our territory, even if the land
    consists of ruins, wilderness, or mountains, for non-Muslim forces
    entering Muslim lands is a weighty matter that cannot be ignored, but
    must be met with effort and struggle to repel them by every possible
    means.