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by Roger Kimball

The State Department Invertbrate embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood

July 21st, 2012 - 5:21 am

Andy McCarthy has a long, fascinating, and depressing piece on the case of State Department aide Huma Abedin, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the “coziness” of many U.S. politicians with an ideology that is inveterately in opposition to democratic capitalism and the individual liberty on which it rests.

Who’s Huma?  You remember:

Ms. Abedin has been an aide since she interned at the White House in 1996 and was assigned to the then–first lady’s staff. The family tie for which she is best known is her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat who resigned from Congress in disgrace last year. But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members [Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), and Lynn Westmorland (Ga.)]. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — the organization itself or prominent members thereof.

Raised eyebrow time? Not if you’re Senator “Maverick,” John I-Was-in-a-North-Vietnam-Prison-Camp McCain.

For pointing this out and merely asking the State Department’s inspector general to look into it and report back to Congress — which is part of the IG’s duties under the statute that created his position — McCain & Co. (i.e., his fans in the left-wing media and his admirers in the Republican establishment) are screaming “smear” and “McCarthyism.” McCain’s antipathy toward conservatives (except during election years) is an old story. And it is no secret that he has long been smitten by Mrs. Clinton, whose transnational-progressive leanings mirror his own.

That’s it in one.

But here’s the 64,000 question:

In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?

[Cue them song from Jeopardy . . . .]

Did you answer, “Hell no” to the first question and “Absolutely” to the second?  Proceed to the head of the class.

Andy proceeds to provide a partial but alarming inventory of ways in which the Obama administration has demonstrated its friendliness to the Muslim Brotherhood (whose explicit ultimate goal, remember, is to wage a “grand jihad” to destroy the United States). Andy focuses his ire on Senator “The Vacillaotr” McCain.  But as one looks at that behavior this administration and its State Department, it is clear that there is  plenty of disapprobation to go around. Yet, as Andy notes, “Some of us . . . really are ‘unalterably opposed’ to the Muslim Brotherhood. The five House conservatives are asking questions to which the State Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense, demand answers. Answers not just about Huma Abedin but, far more significantly, about the government’s policy toward virulently anti-American Islamists. Americans deserve nothing less — even if the usual GOP spaghetti spines would prefer to give them nothing, period.”

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