Akbar: AWE is my ‘personal jihad’
Mohammad Akbar says his people have been unfairly portrayed as American-hating terrorists in the press and popular culture. And to prove his point, he invites a disabled U.S. Army veteran into the ring and beats him with his prosthetic leg.
“This, my friends, is my personal jihad. Now, there has been a lot of misrepresentation about the word jihad. What the word jihad really means is struggle. And my internal struggle has been with your racist views, and the racist views that are taught in high schools like this all across the country to inbred backwards people,” said Akbar, whose skill in the squared circle matches the intensity of the hatred that he has engendered among Awesome Wrestling Entertainment fans in his short time in the company.
His debut came on Feb. 26 at an AWE live event in Palmyra, Va. It was there that Akbar tried to hijack the show at the opening to inform the sellout crowd that he was going to use Awesome Wrestling Entertainment as a platform to educate Americans on what his fellow Muslims are really all about.
“If you pay attention to current events, if they have Internet or television here, then you would know that all across the Middle East people are rising up,” Akbar said. “They’re taking matters into their own hands, and they are changing the system. And it’s no different, my friend, if you live in Egypt, if you live in Libya, if you live in Algeria, or if you live in Virginia. This is my personal jihad. AWE is my stage, and on that stage, I’m going to educate every American, one day at a time.”
The lesson began auspiciously with his beatdown of Michael Hayes, an Army veteran who answered Akbar’s challenge to the military veterans in the crowd at Palmyra to discuss current events with him in the ring. Hayes, a rookie wrestler, took exception to Akbar’s repeated taunts of U.S. troops and responded with a slap directly across Akbar’s face, prompting the attack in which Akbar pulled Hayes’ prosthetic leg off and hit him with it several times before Carlito, Jimmy Yang and Luke Gallows came in from the back to make the save.
Akbar came up short in his match against Gallows, a WWE veteran, later in the card, but he was impressive in defeat – even if the Palmyra fans greeted him with by far the loudest boos of the night.
“You can’t blame these people,” Akbar said. “For a little over 20, 30 years now, anytime somebody of my ethnicity is shown, there’s usually either talk of suicide bombings or terrorism or any other negative connotation that could come about, when we’re really just misunderstood. So no, sir, it does not bother me, based on the propaganda that you people blindly eat up. It’s not a surprise to me that somebody wouldn’t want to sit next to me on a plane. Because I’m rich, I have a little bit of self-confidence, and I’m highly educated, and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I’m sure it’s rubbing you the wrong way right now, isn’t it?”
Video: Mohammad Akbar
