Anthony Weiner's wife Huma's connection to radical Muslims

Where would we be in this country without the reporting of the redoubtable Andrew McCarthy and the many others at National Review, the magazine started and run by William Buckley for decades?  It bears remembering that McCarthy was the successful U.S. prosecuting attorney on the Blind Sheik case, that incarcerated that Muslim madman for his role in planning the first bombing of the twin towers in NYC in the 1990's.  McCarthy has kept alive the extreme threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and by the extremist Muslims out there.  Without his effort we would realistically have no idea how recklessly dangerous are the Obama administration's policies toward Muslims and the Middle East.  This story about Anthony Weiner's wife and her association with The Muslim Brotherhood and its various support groups would never see the light of day absent McCarthy's reporting.  In the case of Huma, Weiner's wife, the burden is on her to explain her relationship with these radical groups.  It would be helpful if some so-called news organization like the NYTimes would turn a few of their investigative journalists loose on this subject but for some inexplicable reason(s) this never seems to happen.

The Huma Unmentionables

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, 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. 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. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run theJMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of theUnion for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book calledWomen in Islam that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote Foreign Policy). What they never quite get around to telling you is that this means “women’s rights” in the repressive sharia context.

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was amember of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood — many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program, which Sam Tadros describes as a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority.” The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing.

As I’ve recounted before, the MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University

has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was . . . Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [aforementioned] Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

Ms. Abedin served as one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top staffers and advisers at the State Department. As I’ve previously detailed, during that time, the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

• The State Department had an emissary in Egypt who trained operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
• The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
• On a trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta then governing the country, to surrender power to the parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the then–newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi had proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States . . . the group’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

As more recent events remind us, this is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

When a handful of House conservatives tried to draw the attention of the State Department’s inspector general to some of these matters – wondering how on earth someone with Ms. Abdein’s background could have qualified for a top-secret security clearance – they were castigated by the Obama White House and the Beltway Republican establishment. As reaffirmed in the last 24 hours, Ms. Abedin’s connections to prominent Islamic-supremacist figures and groups are deemed unsuitable for public discussion – Egyptians may be able to eject the Muslim Brotherhood, but in today’s Washington it is raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood that gets you run out of town.

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. 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.

But let’s not discuss that.

Obama makes race relations worse

Heather MacDonald usually cuts to the chase writing about subjects she covers and she doesn't disappoint in this piece on Obama's recent speech on race.  It is only Obama who disappoints typically as he manages to make most subjects he decides to opine on even more confusing and opaque.  On race matters his entire term has been one of missed opportunities, especially so because of his race and platform.  Were he a sincere and honest person, he might have done much to turn the black ghetto population around and put it on the path to leaving poverty and criminal behavior.  Instead by continuing the blame game he has managed to make the blacks worse off and race relations even worse than when he came into office.  We're looking at a lost cause i9n this man and his administration.

Obama Strikes Out by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal

The only question about President Obama’s surprise Trayvon Martin expostulation on Friday is whether it was the worst speech he’s ever given or simply the worst race-related speech. Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on the crudest kind of racial victimology, in the process diminishing his office and undermining his own record of occasionally speaking the truth about inner-city dysfunction.

Obama begins with a perfunctory nod toward respecting the jury’s not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial. (Zimmerman, as the world knows, was a neighborhood-watch volunteer in a community that had been plagued by black burglaries; he shot and killed the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin during a fight after wrongly suspecting the unarmed teen of being a neighborhood intruder.) Obama then launches into a lesson, presumably for the edification of clueless whites, about the “context” of the trial and “how [black] people have responded to it and how people are feeling.” According to Obama, there is nary a law-abiding black man today who has not been the object of fear and suspicion as he goes about his business:

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

There is no question that in some “contexts,” as Obama would put it, black males elicit heightened scrutiny. In some neighborhoods, shopkeepers do closely watch, if not actually trail, young black males who enter their stores. And there is also no question that being viewed with fear when you are free of any criminal intent is infuriating and can lead to a humiliating sense of being a second-class citizen. This is an experience that all Americans should regret.

But the overwhelming reason for such a reaction, where it exists, is astronomically higher rates of black crime. In New York City, blacks commit 70 percent of all robberies and 63 percent of all grand larcenies, though they are just 23 percent of the population; whites commit 4 percent of all robberies and a little over 10 percent of all grand larcenies, though they are 35 percent of the population. Every American city with a black population shows comparable disparities. In some “contexts,” black crime is even celebrated. Earsnot, a New York graffiti vandal glorified in the documentary Infamy, mocks the trusting retail managers whodon’t follow him as he cases their stores for merchandise: “You have that customer-shopkeeper thing going on, and they have no idea that you’re stealing—no idea. Or, they know that you’re stealing, and they see you in there mad times, and they still can’t stop me because I’m so nice.” According to Infamy’s admiring producers, Earsnot and his crew “commit grand larceny” every day, a walking crime spree that has undoubtedly led many a floor supervisor to adopt exactly the defensive posture that Obama condemns.

The newly rechristened “bash mobs” that have been terrorizing pedestrians and workers in, among other locations, downtown Chicago, Washington,Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, are a black phenomenon, though a squeamish press shrinks from pointing that out. Someone who has been attacked by, or is simply the witness of, rampaging black teens is unlikely to be blasé if he later sees a group of rowdy black youth approaching. Obama may think that a heightened pulse rate or a tightened grip on a purse is an overreaction to such gratuitous violence, but it is an inevitable one. Here is a proposal: For a good five-year stretch, blacks bring their crime rate down to white and Asian levels. Once it becomes widely understood that blacks are no more likely to steal, rob, rape, or shoot than whites or Asians, we’ll see if blacks still elicit the defensive reactions that Obama alleges in elevators and department stores.

Obama grudgingly acknowledges the elevated black crime rate, only to soft-pedal it: “I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.” No, not “probably.” “Statistically,” Trayvon Martin was absolutely more likely to be shot by a peer than by “somebody else.” That does not make the killing of Trayvon Martin any less tragic, but the fact remains that blacks are gunning down blacks at an astronomically higher rate than whites are. Blacks commit upwards of 80 percent of all shootings in New York City, for example; whites, between 1 and 2 percent. New York police officers hope against hope every time that they are called to a shooting incident that they will find a white perpetrator, to balance out the sad monotony of black (and Hispanic) gun violence. They are almost always disappointed.

Obama appears as ignorant about the violent aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. “If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family,” he announced righteously. He should start reminding. “People protesting George Zimmerman’s acquittal marched along Crenshaw Boulevard [in South Central Los Angeles last] Monday night, stomping on cars, chasing bystanders and storming a Wal-Mart,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Any last vestiges of the Rainbow Coalition quickly disintegrated. Fellow Trayvon Martin protester Cuauhtemoc Negrete was punched in the back of the head and robbed of his bike, an attack that he attributes to anti-Latino bias. In Hollywood the next night, “calls started flooding into dispatchers about 8:30p.m. of roaming groups of youths, about 10 or 15 to a group, running into streets, stealing from stores and robbing pedestrians.” Businesses in downtown Oakland, California, are still sweeping up the broken glass after several days of vandalism, including a hammer assault on a restaurant waiter. Downtown Oakland perfected this drill after the 2009 and 2010 anti-police riots.

More significant than Obama’s underplaying of black criminality, however, is his move to “contextualize” it: “Black folks do interpret the reasons for that [crime rate] in a historical context. We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country.” Try telling the fiercely law-abiding residents of Central Harlem and the South Bronx that a teen who mugs an elderly lady needs to be understood “in a historical context.” These brave proponents of law and order, who faithfully attend police-community meetings to show support for their cops, know that what leads a young boy to shoot at a rival gang member is not a lynching from a century ago but the breakdown of parental authority and self-control today. The “root causes” excuse for crime undermines the efforts of these heroic urban watchdogs to strengthen bourgeois norms. And even if it were the case that the primary determinant of current black criminality were this country’s despicable history of slavery and segregation, the only people who can overcome that legacy now are blacks themselves, through self-help and personal responsibility. (University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has forcefully madethis point.)

Obama embraces the “racist criminal-justice system” conceit as well: “The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.” In fact, the effort in the academy to prove such ongoing racial disparities consistently fails, without denting the zeal with which advocates peddle the poisonous idea.

Obama’s prescriptions for the alleged failure of white America to understand black anger at the Zimmerman case are arguably worse than his diagnosis of the causes of that anger. He wants more police agencies to collect racial data on traffic stops and other enforcement activity, and he calls on the Department of Justice to help local police agencies “think about potential racial bias.” The Zimmerman case was not about purportedly racist police stops, of course. But police profiling is a must-have component of the racial-victimology toolbox. Such data-collection mandates accomplish only one thing: providing fodder for lawsuits against the police, since every police agency accurately targeting its resources against crime will produce racially disparate enforcement data. The Department of Justice is already forcing itself on local law enforcement regarding “anti-bias” training, regardless of its lack of expertise in policing.

We also need to do more to “bolster and reinforce our African-American boys,” according to Obama, “and to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.” Reality check: the country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last five decades trying to uplift black boys (and girls). Virtually the entire federal and state education establishment is focused on a single goal: closing the achievement gap between white and black students, no matter the cost. Under President George W. Bush, Washington imposed onerous testing and data-collection mandates on schools in the hope of equalizing black and white test scores, even if schools did so by undereducating their highest-performing students. If a black boy simply graduates from high school with a GPA that passes the laugh test, private colleges across the nation will beat down his door to recruit him. Public universities insist on the right to use equally blatant racial preferences to admit their own treasured store of underqualified black students. If that black undergraduate finishes college, elite employers and professional schools will zealously seek him out. Individual philanthropists in cities large and small rush to offer high school and college scholarships to black boys; all that the beneficiaries have to do is stay in school and out of jail. Foundations roll out program after program to keep black boys off the street. Captains of industry have become experts in school reform in order to improve the life prospects of black boys.

But this effort seems lost on Obama. He proposes, as if it were a novel idea, gathering together “business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that—and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed.” Like every other such convocation, with its inevitable tail of taxpayer and privately funded programs, this gabfest will fail, because it omits the one group of adults who would make a difference in black boys’ lives: their fathers. If black boys knew that their fathers, not just “their country,” “care about them and value them,” in Obama’s words; if their fathers were married to their mothers and involved in their moral formation; if those boys were raised with the expectation that they themselves must be responsible for their own children, this futile parade of programs could finally come to an end.

Obama’s silence about black family breakdown at this particular moment, when he knew that his words would get maximum attention, is a monumentally lost opportunity. It is also deeply puzzling, given that in the past Obama has admirably broken the taboo against mentioning the toll of fatherlessness—if not as often as the catastrophe merits, at least more than the race industry would like. His failure to address the issue now suggests that the rhetorical conventions of black victimology, once activated, are so powerful that they crush anything that stands in their way.

As for Obama’s final call “for all of us to do some soul-searching, . . . to ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can”: of course we should never condone or cultivate prejudice. But to turn one incident into a symbol of national anti-black racism is ludicrous on every front. Even were there any indication that Zimmerman was a blind bigot (which he wasnot), that fact would not implicate the country at large.

Or perhaps Obama is impugning the jury here, though criminal-law experts are virtually unanimous in judging the acquittal a fair response to the prosecution’s charges. But if we’re going to do some soul-searching, Obama could ask what drives the recent urban rampages or greatly asymmetrical black-on-white crime. If white teens were marauding through black neighborhoods assaulting passersby and store employees, the Justice Department would have sent in armies of federal prosecutors, if not the National Guard, faster than you can say “hate crime.” Black parents are allegedly warning their children against racist whites based on one tragic incident; in any other “context,” that would be called “profiling.”

Until now, Obama has left the race-mongering to his administration and has largely kept race out of his own self-presentation. That is as it should be, regardless of a president’s skin color. The aspiration of color-blindness is an essential one, and increasingly within reach. Now, however, Obama is being celebrated as “really” a “black president,” not just one who happens to be black. But if a white president lectured blacks about why whites are losing patience with black victimology, that would rightly be viewed as a betrayal of the office.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.