Politics

WEINSTEIN: Let’s stop the crazy Huma Abedin conspiracies

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
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While most of America is thinking of stupid jokes to make about Anthony Weiner’s most recent wiener scandal, some see the imbroglio as a diversion from the real issue: That Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a stealth jihadist seeking to destroy Western civilization from the inside.

“What’s amazing to me is that we’re wasting time debating schmekelgate, OK, when Huma Abedin who has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, who is connected to the chief financier of al Qaida, is his wife and has top security clearance,” political commentator Brooke Goldstein declared on Fox News’ “Hannity” during a discussion of the Weiner scandal last week.

“What Brooke points to, that’s the real Huma Abedin story,” political commentator Monica Crowley interjected, agreeing with Goldstein. “It’s not about Weiner’s weiner, it’s about Huma Abedin and her ties to Islamic supremacists.”

Abedin’s worldview is certainly fair game. She was a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and is likely to remain in high-level politics even if her husband fails in his bid to become mayor of New York.

But people like the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy use what are some seemingly troubling personal and familial connections to suggest Abedin is the font of all the horrible policies the Obama administration has pursued while Clinton was at the State Department.

During the time Abedin was working for Clinton as deputy chief of staff at the State Department, McCarthy noted in a recent post at National Review Online, “the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

So suspicious. I wonder what could account for that other than Abedin’s nefarious influence. Maybe nothing. Or maybe it was the fact that Clinton was at the State Department at the time the Arab Spring engulfed the Middle East, toppling dictators and propelling Muslim Brotherhood-aligned parties into power. Agree or disagree with the policy, there is a context to it.

What’s more, Abedin’s influence must be more widespread than even her most virulent critics recognize because it wasn’t only the Obama administration that was willing to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the country’s 2011 revolution. A top Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser told me in December 2011 that the U.S. had to “to deal with them but as part of the Egyptian government.” In fact, rightly or wrongly, the administration of George W. Bush made limited contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt even before the 2011 revolution.

But take a step back for a moment: How is it possible to believe that Obama’s Middle East foreign policy is driven by the deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton? Is there any evidence for this? It’s like the deranged critics of the Bush administration who claim Jewish neoconservatives forced America into a war with Iraq to protect Israel. To believe that, you had to believe that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were the puppet-masters of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush (not to mention that their only concern was for Israel, not America). That’s insane.

Another major biographical point that critics of Huma bring up is that she worked for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1996 to 2003.

“Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef,” McCarthy notes in his post. “Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996-2003), Ms. Abedin worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.”

I can’t say I’ve ever read JMMA, but the picture McCarthy paints of it is troubling. But then I came across, via blogger Andrew Bostum, a circa-2003 masthead and found one example of the kind of firebreathing Islamist who served on the Journal’s board: Bernard Lewis, the former Princeton professor who is arguably the most distinguished scholar of Islamic history in the world. Lewis served on the advisory editorial board of JMMA from 1996 to 2010.

If you don’t know who Lewis is, he is not some leftwing academic. He is beloved by conservatives, especially conservative foreign policy intellectuals. In 2011, Lewis even went on the National Review cruise. Again, I don’t read JMMA, but if Lewis is willing to be associated with it — and, just as importantly, they are willing to be associated with Lewis — I doubt it is quite the intellectual journal for al Qaida that McCarthy suggests it is (which is not to say some its essays aren’t troubling).

Abedin may be an Islamic supremacist as her critics claim, but if she is, it is sure odd that she would marry a Jewish congressman. Here’s where the conspiracy really goes into overdrive. Her conspiratorial critics will say this is all part of her plot to get to the center of power in order to destroy Western civilization or turn the Middle East over to the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever. By marrying a Jew, it will divert questions from her troubling past as she continues to whisper into Hillary’s ear as her boss moves toward the White House.

“The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists,” McCarthy writes.

That’s hard to believe unless you think the world is like some terrible thriller novel, but there is one fact that I think can’t be overcome. Abedin not only had a son with Weiner, but she allowed her son to have a Jewish ceremonial male circumcision, a bris.

The New York Post reports: “The couple used their new building’s 1,400-square-foot commons area, with a bar and billiards table, to host a the party for son Jordan’s bris earlier this year.”

No matter how deceptive Abedin might be in her quest to destroy Christendom, it strikes me as extremely implausible that  a Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Islamic supremacist would allow her child to be the subject of a Jewish religious ceremony of any kind.

So I’m all for looking into Abedin’s worldview and what type of foreign policy advice she provides Clinton, the person with the best shot of being the next President of the United States. But how about we cut out the crazy.

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