Senator John McCain’s claim that concerns about Huma Abedin are a smear based on “a few
unspecified and unsubstantiated associations” proves more embarrassing by the day. In fact, to the extent it addressed Ms. Abedin, the
letter sent to the State Department’s inspector general by five House conservatives actually understated the case.
The
letter averred that Abedin “has three family members — her late father,
her mother and her brother — connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives
and/or organizations.” It turns out, however, that Abedin herselfis
directly connected to Abdullah Omar Naseef, a major Muslim Brotherhood
figure involved in the financing of al-Qaeda. Abedin worked for a number
of years at the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs as assistant
editor of its journal. The IMMA was founded by Naseef, who remained
active in it for decades, overlapping for several years with Abedin.
Naseef was also secretary general of the Muslim World League in Saudi
Arabia, perhaps the most significant Muslim Brotherhood organization in
the world. In that connection, he founded the Rabita Trust, which is
formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American
law due to its support of al-Qaeda.
You ought to be able to stop right there.
A
person is not required to have done anything wrong to be denied a
high-ranking government position, or more immediately, the security
clearance allowing access to classified information that is necessary to
function in such a job. There simply need be associations, allegiances,
or interests that establish a potential conflict of interest.
Government
jobs and access to the nation’s secrets are privileges, not rights.
That is why the potential conflict needn’t stem from one’s own
associations with hostile foreign countries, organizations, or persons.
Vicarious associations, such as one’s parents’ connections to
troublesome persons and organizations, are sufficient to create a
potential conflict.
In this
instance, however, before you even start probing the extensive,
disturbing Brotherhood ties of her family members, Huma Abedin should
have been ineligible for any significant government position based on
her own personal and longstanding connection to Naseef’s organization.
Specifically, Ms. Abedeen was affiliated with the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, where she was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. The journal was the IMMA’s raison d’etre.
Abedin held the position of assistant editor from 1996 through 2008 —
from when she began working as an intern in the Clinton White House
until shortly before she took her current position as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.
The
IMMA was founded in the late 1970s by Abdullah Omar Naseef, who was then
the vice president of the prestigious King Abdulaziz University in
Saudi Arabia. The IMMA’s chief product was to be its journal. For the
important position of managing editor, Naseef recruited his fellow
academic Zyed Abedin, who had been a visiting professor at the
university in the early 1970s.
To join
the IMMA, Dr. Abedin moved his family, including infant daughter Huma
(born in 1976), to Saudi Arabia from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Zyed’s wife,
Saleha Mahmood Abedin (Huma’s mother), is also an academic and worked
for the journal from its inception. She would eventually take it over
after her husband died in 1993, and she remains its editor to this day.
Huma Abedin’s brother Hassan, another academic, is an associate editor
at the journal.
The
journal began publishing in 1979. For its initial edition, Abdullah Omar
Naseef — identified in the masthead as “Chairman, Institute of Muslim
Minority Affairs” — penned a brief introduction relating the IMMA’s
vision for the journal. Zyed Abedin appeared as managing editor in the
journal’s second edition in 1979, proclaiming in a short introduction
his “deep appreciation to H.E. Dr. Abdullah O. Naseef, President, King
Abdulaziz University, for his continued guidance, support, and
encouragement.” (I am indebted to the Center for Security Policy, which
obtained some copies of the journal, going back many years.)
Not
long after the journal started, Naseef became the secretary general of
the Muslim World League, the Saudi-financed global propagation
enterprise by which the Muslim Brotherhood’s virulently anti-Western
brand of Islamist ideology is seeded throughout the world, very much
including in the United States.
We are
not talking here about some random imam in the dizzying alphabet soup of
Islamist entities. In the pantheon of Islamic supremacism, there are
few positions more critical than secretary general of the Muslim World
League. In fact, one of the MWL’s founders was
Sa’id Ramadan, the right-hand and son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s legendary founder.
The MWL
manages the “civilization jihad” — the Brotherhood’s commitment to
destroy the West from within, and to “conquer” it by sharia proselytism
(or dawa), as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s top sharia jurist, puts it.
Nevertheless, the MWL has a long history of deep involvement in violent jihad as well.
It was
under MWL auspices in 1988 that Naseef created a “charity” called the
Rabita Trust. The scare-quotes around “charity” are intentional. To
direct the Rabita Trust, Naseef selected
Wael Hamza Jalaidan. A few years earlier, Jalaidan had joined with Osama bin Laden to form al-Qaeda.
This
would surprise you only if you waste your time listening to John McCain,
Version 2012 — as opposed to John McCain, Version 2011, who
professed himself “unalterably opposed” to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As Reliance instructs, zakat can
only be given to Muslims, and one-eighth of it is supposed to be
donated to “those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic
military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army
roster.” Remember that the next time you hear the ubiquitous claim that
Muslim charities are being misused as “fronts” for terrorism. This is
not a “misuse” and they are not “fronts.” Under sharia, the streaming of
donations to violent jihadists is quite intentional.
A month
after the 9/11 attacks, Naseef’s Rabitah Trust was formally designated
as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States government.
Ultimately, branches of the
al-Haramain Islamic Foundationand the
International Islamic Relief Organization –
other “charities” with roots in the MWL — were also designated as
foreign terrorist organizations under federal law. This, too, should
have not been a surprise. In 2003, in connection with a terrorism
prosecution in Chicago, the Justice Department
proffered that
Osama bin Laden had told his aide Jamal al-Fadl that the Muslim World
League was one of al-Qaeda’s three top funding sources. (Fadl later
renounced al-Qaeda and cooperated with federal prosecutors.)
Throughout
the time that he ran the MWL and the Rabita Trust, Naseef kept his hand
in at the IMMA. In fact, he continued to be listed on the masthead as a
member of the “advisory editorial board” at the IMMA’s journal until
2003. We might hazard a guess why his name disappeared after that: in
2004, he was named as a defendant in the civil case brought by victims
of the 9/11 atrocities. (In 2010, a federal court dropped him from the
suit — not because he was found uninvolved, but because a judge reasoned
the American court lacked personal jurisdiction over him.)
Huma
Abedin was affiliated with the IMMA’s journal for a dozen years, from
1996 through 2008. She overlapped with its founder, Naseef, for at least seven years —
it could be more, but I am assuming for argument’s sake that Naseef had
no further involvement in his institute once his name was removed from
the masthead.
The
case against Ms. Abedin’s suitability for a high-level position with
access to the nation’s secrets gets much worse if you add in her family
ties.
To summarize what I’ve already
outlined here
at Ordered Liberty: her parents were recruited by Naseef to head up the
IMMA; her mother is an active member of Muslim Brotherhood
organizations — including the Muslim Sisterhood and two entities that
are part of Sheikh Qaradawi’s Union of Good, another designated
terrorist organization; there is persuasive evidence that her father was
a member of the Brotherhood — e.g., the intimate tie to Naseef and his
widow’s membership in the Muslim Sisterhood (which is substantially
comprised of wives and female relatives of prominent Muslim Brothers);
her mother is a tireless advocate of sharia law as preached by Qaradawi
and the Brotherhood; and her brother, who is also affiliated with the
IMMA’s journal, was a fellow at an Islamist institute (the Oxford Center
for Islamic Studies) on whose board sat both Naseef and Qaradawi.
Nevertheless,
the family ties to the Brotherhood only further elucidate what is
already patent: Huma Abedin’s connection to Abdullah Omar Naseef, by
itself, would have been more than enough justification to deny her a
security clearance. That would have made it inconceivable that she could
serve as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of state.
Ms.
Abedin has very disturbing connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Though
she is not a policymaker, she is an important adviser, and during her
three-year tenure, federal government policy has radically shifted in
the Brotherhood’s favor, to the point that the Obama administration is
not only embracing the previously shunned Brotherhood but issuing visas
to members of formally designated terrorist organizations.
The
question is not whether the five House conservatives were off-base in
asking for an investigation into ties between administration officials
and Islamist organizations. The question is why the other 430 members of
the House haven’t joined them — and why John McCain, John Boehner, and
other Republican establishment luminaries are championing the Muslim
Brotherhood’s side of the dispute.
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