….A little more background: At the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, Ms. Abedin [Huma’s Mom] was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. The journal was the Institute’s main product. It promotes the fundamentalist version of sharia championed by the Muslim Brotherhood, by Abdullah Omar Naseef, and by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. Ms. Abedin was assistant editor from 1996 through 2008 — from the time she began working as an intern in the Clinton White House, until the time shortly before she took her current position as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.
The Institute was founded by Naseef in the late 1970s. He is a hugely influential Saudi who was then the vice president of the King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. Naseef recruited an academic colleague, Zyed Abedin — Ms. Abedin’s late father — to be the journal’s managing editor.
Zyed Abedin thus moved his family to Saudi Arabia from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Ms. Abedin was about two at the time. Her mother, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is also an academic and worked for the journal from its inception. She would eventually take the journal over after her husband died in 1993. She remains its editor to this day. Huma Abedin’s brother Hassan, another academic, is an associate editor at the journal.
Not long after the journal started, Naseef became the secretary general of the Muslim World League. As the Washington Post has noted, the MWL was launched by Muslim Brotherhood activists with the financial backing of the Saudi royal family. It is often referred to as a charity, but it is really a global propagation enterprise — exporting the Brotherhood’s virulently anti-Western brand of Islamist ideology throughout the world, very much including in the United States.
There are few positions in Muslim Brotherhood circles 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 is part of the foundation of the grand jihad — what the Brotherhood also calls its “civilization jihad” against the West.
Nevertheless, the MWL has a long history of deep involvement in violent jihad as well. It was under the auspices of the MWL that, in 1988, Naseef created a charity called the Rabita Trust. To direct the Rabita Trust, Naseef selected Wael Hamza Jalaidan. Jalaidan is not just a member of al-Qaeda. He was a close associate of Osama bin Laden’s and actually helped establish the al Qaeda terror network.
According to Osama bin Laden himself, the Muslim World League was one of al-Qaeda’s three top funding sources. Consequently, after 9/11, Naseef’s Rabita Trust was formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. So were branches of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and the International Islamic Relief Organization, two other Saudi-backed “charities” spawned by the MWL.
Throughout the time that he ran the MWL and the Rabita Trust, Naseef kept his hand in at the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, where the Abedin family continued to run his journal. In fact, Naseef 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 as to why his name suddenly disappeared after that: Naseef’s involvement in funding al Qaeda was so notorious 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.)
So to summarize, Ms. Abedin had a very lengthy affiliation with an institute founded by a top figure at the nexus between Saudi terror funding, Brotherhood ideology, and al Qaeda’s jihad against the United States. Even if the only pertinent information we had was her personal tie to Naseef, that would be extraordinarily disturbing. But as the five House members pointed out, there is much more.
…lots more to read!…