Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood: Closely Connected

Senator John McCain ought to be embarrassed. So should House Speaker John Boehner and Congressman Mike Rogers, the former FBI agent who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence.

These pillars of the Republican establishment have been championing the cause of Huma Abedin, the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin’s name arose, along with several others, in connection with questions pressed by five conservative House Republicans regarding Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the United States government. The GOP establishment, led by McCain, Boehner and Rogers, has been slamming Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, one of the five House conservatives, over her refusal to back down from concerns over Ms. Abedin.

Here are four things, among many, that we now know:

1. Huma Abedin’s mother, Dr. Saleha S. Mahmood Abedin (hereafter, Saleha Abedin), is an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s division for women, the Muslim Sisterhood. She is also a zealous advocate of sharia law’s oppression of women — which McCain himself condemned in a 2011 interview with Der Spiegel.

2. Not only that: Saleha Abedin is a board member of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief. The IICDR has been long banned in Israel for supporting Hamas. It is also part of the Union for Good, which is a formally designated international terrorist organization under federal law. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the chief sharia jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, and has issued fatwas endorsing suicide bombings against Israel and terrorist attacks against American forces in Iraq.

3. Moreover, it turns out that Huma Abedin herself was, until late 2008, a member of another of her mother’s Islamist organizations, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. The Center for Security Policy has reviewed past mastheads of the IMMA’s journal. Huma Abedin is listed as an assistant editor (to her mother, the editor-in-chief) as far back as 1996, the year she began interning at the Clinton White House. The IMMA was started in Saudi Arabia in the Seventies by Huma Abedin’s parents, with the backing of Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef is a former secretary-general of the Muslim World League, which, as I’ve previously explained, has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology. Under the auspices of the MWL, Naseef not only backed the IMMA; he founded the Rabita Trust, which — like the Union for Good — is a specially designated international terrorist organization under federal law.

4. Furthermore, Huma Abedin’s brother, Hassan Abedin, besides also being part of the IMMA, was a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. On the board at the Oxford Center when Hassan Abedin was a fellow were the aforementioned Brotherhood heavyweights and terror promoters, Sheikh Qaradawi and Abdullah Omar Naseef.

There is a great deal of background information now available about Huma Abedin and her family connections to the Brotherhood. In particular, extensive research has been done by Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brother who has renounced the Brotherhood, and the Center for Security Policy. I would encourage interested readers to peruse the information they have put out, and are continuing to unearth. I am simply distilling the highlights, which powerfully demonstrate that it is the Republican establishment acting irresponsibly, not Rep. Bachmann and her conservative colleagues. (...)