I don’t know who is more shocked about this, me or Huma Abedin, but it turns out that a former top Clinton Foundation official is also … a senior Muslim Brotherhood official who has just been arrested for – you’ll never guess – inciting violence in Egypt. Not to worry, I’m sure it was only moderate violence.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports on Gehad [as in Jihad] el-Haddad:
A senior Muslim Brotherhood official who, until recently, had been employed by the William J. Clinton Foundation was arrested in Cairo on Tuesday and charged with inciting violence.
Gehad el-Haddad served as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top communications officials until Egyptian security forces seized him as part of a wider crackdown on officials loyal to ousted former President Mohamed Morsi.
Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by former President Bill Clinton.
El-Haddad gained a reputation for pushing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda in the foreign press, where he was often quoted defending the Brotherhood’s crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt.
He was raised in a family of prominent Brotherhood supporters and became the public face of the Islamist organization soon after leaving his post at the Clinton Foundation. However, much of his official work with the Brotherhood took place while he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation.
Funny how that works. As I’ve previously recounted, Ms. Abedin began working for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton while simultaneously (a) working at an Islamist journal with top al Qaeda financier Abdullah Omar Naseef (the funding device, a “charity” called the Rabita Trust, which Naseef ran with al Qaeda founder Wael Jalaidan, is a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law); and (b) serving on the executive board of the Muslim Students Association’s George Washington University chapter. (The Muslim Students Association is the first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, and the late, unlamented al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki – an MSA alum, like Morsi, Jalaidan and Ms. Abedin – was the “chaplain” at the GWU chapter at the same time he was providing, er, spiritual advice to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers).
Adam Kredo’s report goes on to explain that Gehad el-Haddad’s placement in the Morsi inner-circle was a natural because of family ties: el-Haddad’s father was a top foreign policy adviser to Morsi, the Brotherhood leader, America-basher, anti-Semite, and now-ousted Egyptian president.
Small world: Ms. Abedin’s parents (her mother and late father) have also been prominent Brotherhood figures. In fact, besides running the journal founded by Naseef, Ms. Abedin’s mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is reportedly a member of the Muslim Sisterhood … as is Morsi’s wife. Mrs. Abedin also runs a sharia promotion organization called the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), which is part of another group, the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), that has been banned in Israel for providing material support to Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist branch). Both IICWC and IICDR operate under the umbrella of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi’s Union of Good. Sheikh Qaradawi is the Brotherhood’s chief jurist and has issued fatwas endorsing suicide bombings in Israel and the killing of American troops in Iraq – and his Union of Good is a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law.
Adam also notes that el-Haddad was the Brotherhood official placed in charge of the “Renaissance Project” in February 2011, while he was still at the Clinton Foundation. The report describes the “Renaissance Project” as “a Brotherhood-backed economic recovery program.” Actually, that’s not the half of it. As I outlined in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy:
[In early 2011, just after Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badi announced that jihad was “the only solution against Zio-American arrogance and tyranny”] Khairat el-Shater … began making himself heard. Shater is the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Deputy General Guide.” He is a charismatic figure, revered as the “Iron Man” for his defiant refusal to buckle through two decades of repeated detention and prosecution by Mubarak’s regime[.]…He also brings intellectual heft: after Mubarak fell, it was to Shater that the Brotherhood turned to craft its comprehensive strategy for shaping Egypt’s future.
The Brothers have a name for this enterprise. It is called “the Nahda Project” – the Islamic “Renaissance.”
In April 2011, Shater delivered a lengthy lecture, “Features of Nahda: Gains of the Revolution and the Horizons for Developing.”… Shater’s instruction was remarkable. He emphasized that the Brotherhood’s fundamental principles and goals never change, only the tactics by which they are pursued. “You all know that our main and overall mission as Muslim Brothers is to empower God’s religion on earth, to organize our life and the lives of the people on the basis of Islam, to establish the Nahda of the ummah and its civilization on the basis of Islam, and to subjugate people to God on earth.” Shater went on to reaffirm the time-honored plan of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, stressing the need for both personal piety and internal organizational discipline in pursuing the goal of worldwide Islamic hegemony.
The lecture dovetailed with a 93-page platform released by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, under the guidance of its leader Mohammed Morsi, a Shater confidant. The platform proposed to put every aspect of human life under sharia-compliant state regulation. The document was unmistakably anti-Western and anti-Israeli: structuring civil society on the foundation of “Arab and Islamic unity”; making the “strengthen[ing] of Arab and Islamic identity” the “goal of education”; making treaties (think: Camp David Accord) subject to approval by the population (i.e., the same population that had just, by a landslide, adopted the Islamist position on constitutional amendments); and describing Israel, “the Zionist entity, [as] an aggressive, expansionist, racist and settler entity.”
But hey, nothing to see here. And no word yet on whether Senator McCain will be taking to the Senate floor once more to rail against this obvious smear campaign against a Clinton confidant with deep ties to Islamic supremacism.
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