Huma Abedin, Islamist Connections and Willful Blindness
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and New York Times bestselling author who put the Blind Sheik behind bars in the first World Trade Center bombing. He is the author of Willful Blindness and, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
FP: Hi Andy, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.
You are carefully following the controversy over Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and her ties to Islamic supremacism. Give us an update on your findings. Walid Shoebat has discovered something quit startling lately, yes?
McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie, it’s a pleasure to be back.
You’re right, Walid Shoebat – who has done essential research in this area – did indeed come up with an eye-opening discovery. He has detailed it here, and I wrote about it here. It is an Arabic document that outlines the Saudi government’s efforts to propagate the Kingdom’s fundamentalist version of Islam and sharia (Islam’s legal system and framework for society). The document is called The Efforts of the Servant of the Two Holy Places, King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, to Support the Muslim Minorities. Walid has described it as a “manifesto.”
It bears on the present controversy because Huma Abedin served for a dozen years as the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, publication of which was the main business of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Both the institute and the journal were founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a wealthy and influential Saudi academic who became a financier of the al Qaeda terror network as well as the secretary-general of Muslim World League – one of the most significant joint ventures of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi government in terms of spreading Islamic supremacist ideology. Naseef recruited Huma Abedin’s parents to run the journal when it started in the late seventies, and it has been an Abedin family venture since that time, with Naseef remaining closely involved.
FP: Why “Muslim Minority Affairs”?
McCarthy: Well, that’s really the salience of Walid’s latest find. From the Saudi and Brotherhood perspective, “Muslim Minority Affairs” is not merely a title for an institute or a journal. It is a strategy and a jurisprudence of building the global Islamist movement by integrating into the West, resisting assimilation, establishing enclaves of Islamic supremacism, and pressuring host governments both to accommodate what become growing Muslim demands and to indulge the rule of sharia in these enclaves – which sets a precedent that facilitates the gradual incorporation of sharia elements in the law and culture of the host country.
This design, of course, has to be considered in context with what else we know about the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been brazen about its intention to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe” by dawa – the aggressive form of proselytism that pressures non-Muslim societies to adopt sharia incrementally. And in the Brotherhood’s private communications, as I explain in The Grand Jihad, it has described its work in America as a “grand jihad” or a “civilization jihad” to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.”
As I outlined in a speech at the National Press Club about two weeks ago, the overarching Saudi/Brotherhood design, coupled with Naseef’s key involvement and the substance of what one reads in the journal (a subject on which Andrew Bostom has done important work), underscores that the direct link between Ms. Abedin and Naseef is very troubling. Indeed, the intimate connection of the Abedin family with Naseef, their ties to such other Brotherhood luminaries as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, and the connections not only to the Brotherhood but to organizations that have been formally designated as facilitators of terrorism, powerfully demonstrates that the five conservative members of the House of Representatives were absolutely right to raise concerns about Islamist influence in our government.
FP: So one would think that a lot of people owe Michelle Bachmann an apology, including the media. Where is the apology?
McCarthy: Congresswoman Bachmann knows Washington well enough not to be holding her breath waiting for an apology. What is really stunning and demoralizing to me, though, is that only five members of Congress – five out of 535 if you count both chambers – have had the conscientiousness and courage to stand up and be counted on this. We have an obvious national security problem, and it goes way beyond Huma Abedin. We not only have several people with significant Islamist ties being consulted by our government on foreign and domestic policy, including counterterrorism policy. We are simultaneously seeing American policy shift dramatically in a direction that favors the Muslim Brotherhood, an avowed, incorrigible enemy of America and the West. Yet, we can’t even get one percent of our elected federal representatives to raise an eyebrow? I’ll tell you what. I speak to a lot of people around the country, and a lot more than one percent of them are worried about what’s happening.
FP: Share with us a bit about Huma’s involvement with the MSA and what that signifies.
McCarthy: Yes, that’s disturbing, too. In 19997, Ms. Abedin was on the executive board of the Muslim Students Association at George Washington University in Washington – while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and while she was an assistant editor at Naseef’s journal. The Muslim Students Association is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure – an infrastructure that the Brotherhood has quite intentionally constructed for the purpose of executing the “Muslim Minority Affairs” strategy of giving like-minded Muslims the space and fortitude to resist assimilation and demand accommodation. As I explained in The Grand Jihad, this strategy is also aptly described as “voluntary apartheid,” and one of its most influential proponents in Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist.
The Brotherhood started the MSA in the early sixties and there are now hundreds of chapters at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. Of course, thousands of students have been involved in these organizations. Many of them join for innocuous social reasons – to make friends with people of similar cultural background, etc. You have to be careful about over-generalizing: not everyone who is or ever has been part of a MSA chapter harbors sympathies for the Brotherhood and its ideology. Indeed, some MSA chapters – especially the ones that are not formally connected to the national organization (I should perhaps say the “continental” organization, since Canada is included) – reflect the debates about reform that are extraordinarily important and very much a part of Islam in the West.
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