“Who is the head of the Muslim peace movement,” journalist Chris Plante asked of my Facebook friend Saba Ahmed at a recent, nationally notorious exchange at a Heritage Foundation panel.
Despite Ahmed answering with a willingness to lead any such movement, her past provokes deeply disturbing questions about oft-sought “moderate Muslims” and their ability to counter aggressive Islamic agendas.
Having previously met, the veiled Ahmed smiled to me in the audience during the first panel of a June 16 seminar on the September 11, 2012 attack upon America’s Benghazi, Libya, consulate.
“How can we fight an ideological war with weapons?” was Ahmed’s not particularly pertinent audience question for the panel.
Ahmed argued that “we portray Islam and all Muslims as bad” while 1.8 billion followers of Islam remained unrepresented on the panel. Agreeing with Ahmed’s emphasis on ideology, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney’s response distinguished between personally pious Muslims and a faith-based political agenda of brutal sharia law.
That Ahmed “stood there to make a point about peaceful, moderate Muslims” while showing no interest in the panel’s discussion of a lethal attack against Americans, however, irritated national security activist Brigitte Gabriel.
“We are not here to bash Muslims… I am glad you are here,” Gabriel stated before asking to a standing ovation, “but where are the others speaking out?”
Gabriel cited intelligence estimates from various countries rating 15-25 percent of Muslims worldwide as radicals, a group perhaps as large as the American population.
“Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda,” Gabriel argued in describing the outsized influence of a militant minority such as jihadists. Just as the peaceful majority were irrelevant in imperial Japan and Communist dictatorships such as in China and the Soviet Union.
“It is time that we take political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs” Gabriel announced to cheers.