Abedin/ Weiner marriage and dumb “Muslim plots” - updated 8/1/13

Sheila Musaji

Posted Aug 1, 2013      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Abedin/ Weiner marriage and dumb “Muslim plots”

by Sheila Musaji


The Muslim demographics plot to take over America and the west by having lots of children and growing their current 1% of the population of the U.S. to a majority, so that they can then “revert to Sharia Law” may have been the “dumbest Muslim plot” ever, but the Muslim marriage plot comes a close second. 

For those who might not remember the Muslim demographics “plot”, here’s a little background

There are currently about 5 million Muslims in the U.S. and about 300 million total population - 1%.  I am not a mathematician, but looking at geography.com’s information on current growth rates for the U.S., it seems that the U.S. population should double in about 77 years (i.e. by 2086).  If the Muslim population doubles at the same rate, then there will be 10 million Muslims out of a population of 600 million - 1.6%.  If the Muslim population increases at twice the norm, then it is possible that there could be 20 million Muslims out of a population of 600 million - 3.3%. 

No matter how I look at the numbers, whoever these Muslims are who are planning a population takeover of the U.S., they will have a long wait, as it will take hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years to reach their goal.  This is the stupidist racist crap I have ever seen.

A few days ago I wrote an article Eliana Benador and the Washington Times Go Beyond Islamophobia to Raving, Paranoid, Lunacy! regarding an article she had written about the Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin marriage.  Benador titled her article “Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin: Married to a Muslim agenda?”.  The title got my attention.  What possible “Muslim agenda” could there be in a tawdry sex scandal that will probably destroy an interfaith marriage?  The article was noticed by a lot of other people, and subsequently pulled from the Washington Times site.

In the course of her rant, Benador managed to work in a lot of nasty speculation — Weiner may have converted to Islam, or Abedin may have left Islam, otherwise why would a Muslim Imam have given her advice to be understanding,  — had Abedin “been groomed to access leading political movers and shakers to advance the cause of Islam in America, including a politically positioned marriage to Congressman Anthony Weiner?” — “When looking broadly at the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin union, we have to wonder if the coupling of a Jewish American man and a Muslim woman of her pedigree was fostered by love or by a socialist political agenda.” —“It is also important, when looking at this situation, to remember that observant Muslims practice Taqiyya , an element of sharia that states there is a legal right and duty to distort the truth to promote the cause of Islam. ...”

In Benador’s article an Imam from a NY mosque becomes “The Imam of New York” and “a leading Muslim Imam”, and his simple advice takes on a sinister hue.  The Imam may hold a minority opinion, but to the Islamophobes, Muslims are not allowed to hold differing opinions.  To them, Muslims are like the Borg of Star Trek and share a hive-mind.  Benador suggests a devious Muslim plot to groom attractive Muslim women to marry important men or politicians - an Islamic/socialist/left wing plot to advance a pro-Muslim Agenda and take over America. 

This was such crazy nonsense that I thought it might be limited to the real lunatic fringe of the Islamophobia industry.  However, I seem to have been incorrect in that assumption. 

Daniel Pipes updated his 2005 article attacking Grover Norquist as a pro-Islamist.  In the original article Pipes spent a lot of time discussing Norquist’s Muslim wife, and the possible meaning of that mixed-marriage.  Pipes closed the original article with “But if Grover Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist.”

In Pipes mind, anyone who marries a Muslim must be suspect, as in his June 9, 2011 update Pipes said: “Speaking of non-Muslim men prominent in American politics who marry Muslim women, did Anthony Weiner, born Jewish, convert to Islam to marry Huma Abedin, a Muslim of South Asian origins? According to one account, he has accommodated his pious wife by “giving up drinking and even occasionally fasting in Ramadan.” Ben Barrack marshalls evidence to suggest that he did at “Did Weiner Secretly Convert to Islam to Marry a Muslim?”

The article that Pipes is recommending as an explanation of the Weiner/Abedin marriage is as crazy as Benador’s article. 

Barrack questions why this Imam would advise Abedin to stand by her husband when “Dr. Anwar Shoeb of the faculty of Islamic law in Kuwait declared that the marriage between Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin is null and void, considering it adultery as confirmed in the Sharia position, prohibiting the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim, regardless of whether he is a Jew or a Christian.”  Barrack then asks “Abu-Namous is in direct opposition to his Islamic superiors? Why?”

How does some Islamic scholar in Kuwait become an American Imam’s “Islamic superior”?  I can only assume that the Kuwaiti scholar gained this authority in the same way as Imam Abu-Namous became “the Imam of New York”.

This same Ben Barrack co-authored another article with Walid Shoebat claiming that Huma Abedin’s mother is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood secret women’s wing.  And to further “prove” this Muslim Brotherhood connection,  Barrack and Shoebat come out with the most damning evidence of all that her brother also has MB connections “Neither Huma nor any major western media outlet even mention what is common knowledge in the Arab world. Yet, confirmed by Arab sources – is that Huma Abedin has a brother named Hassan Abedin who works at Oxford University.”

Cue scary music, her brother works at Oxford University.  Obviously that proves something.

They then explain that Oxford University is a known hotbed of Islamist activity which has been infiltrated by Islamists.  Even worse, Abedin’s brother has worked with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. 

Cue more scary music.  Her brother works at Oxford and has worked with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.  Now we know that her brother is truly a Muslim extremist bent on taking over the west and subverting everything we hold dear.

This is the same Alwaleed bin Talal who is the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company of the Fox News Channel.  And, I for one, don’t seee that his money has influenced the Fox News Channel, who appear to be as anti-Muslim as ever.  He is also a large shareholder in many other well-known companies, even Euro Disney.  Perhaps there is some sort of Muslim plot to convert Mickey Mouse.

Pipes likes to consider himself a serious scholar, but to recommend such an article, which even includes reference to Walid Shoebat as some sort of an expert, and which is written by a Texas radio talk show host with no academic credentials undermines Pipes’ claim to serious scholarship.  More on Shoebat here.


UPDATE 6/20/2011

The paranoid conspiracy theories about the Weiner/Abedin marriage continue to morph ....

Eileen Toplansky on The American Thinker repeats all of the nonsense originally published by Benador and Barrack and then adds even more twists to the conspiracy

Huma Abedin’s position with Clinton in the State Department, as well as her marriage to Representative Weiner, has given her enormous exposure “to state secrets and access to the inner workings of Congress.”
— This would be unsettling enough if it were not also for Obama’s latest appointee.  The 44th president has just appointed Azizah al-Hibri to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
— Last year, Obama appointed two devout Muslims to Homeland Security. 
— Congressman Keith Ellison aka Keith Hakim, who converted to Islam, is already in place in Congress.
— Dalia Mogahed was appointed as the first White House Muslim advisor.
— Is the Weiner scandal really covering up a far more disturbing scenario whereby jihadists continue to infiltrate and influence American universities, military installations, homeland security, even local police forces, all while the press ignores the steady encroachment of these radicals who seek to overturn and destroy America?

The disgraceful indifference by the general press to Weiner’s in-laws and their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood keeps eroding America’s ability to rout those who wish to see her destroyed.

True enough, Muslims have been elected and/or appointed to government positions, there are Muslims in the U.S. military, there are Muslims who have died serving their country, there are Muslim police officers and Muslim firemen, Muslim professors and teachers, etc.  Is this screed really inferring that these people are all jihadists infiltrating where they don’t belong simply because they are Muslims?  Is any Muslim a possible Muslim spy?  Do all Muslims want to see America destroyed?

Right Wing Watch reports that Rich Swier, an activist for Tea Party Nation and ACT! for America, claims that Weiner and President Obama “have partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood”, and quotes Swier as saying in an article that It is now clear that President Obama and his administration have partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood. This is dangerous for our national security and akin to FDR partnering with the Soviet Union during WWII. But wait FDR did and look what happened afterword - the Cold War.

Robert Spencer has also jumped on this latest conspiracy bandwagon.  Not surprising since Spencer also thought that Pres. Obama might be a secret Muslim.  Spencer adds one new dimension to this non-story, and as the title of an article by Justin Elliott notes, he spreads the meme.  The new dimension added by Spencer is However, it is also possible, given the recent scandal involving Weiner’s apparently frequent and sexually charged contact with other women, that the rumors that the Abedin/Weiner union is a political marriage of convenience are true. After all, in 2008, Hillary Clinton was running for president. There were widespread insinuations that she was involved in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with Abedin, her ever-present personal assistant. Those whisperings persisted into Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Abedin’s 2010 marriage to Weiner, at which Bill Clinton presided, put those rumors to rest.  And, this is the man that Andrew McCarthy thinks is a credible “expert” on Islam.

Spencer’s partner Pamela Geller adds her own sick twist suggesting that the marriage of Abedin and Weiner is a sham to cover a “relationship” between Hillary Clinton and Abedin, and further that Abedin is some kind of Muslim Brotherhood plant.  Geller said I am not reporting it because it is a lesbian thang, I am concerned and distressed that a Muslim raised in Saudi Arabia whose father was an ‘Islamic scholar’ in Saudi Arabia would have such intimate access to a would be President.


UPDATE 7/30/12

Serena Dai in The Atlantic has published The Convoluted Connections That Link Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood.  She does an excellent job of debunking these dubious connections. 

I have also posted on TAM The Islamophobic Attempt to Marginalize American Muslim Civic Participation which lists numerous examples of the current relentless attempt to marginalize American Muslims and to characterize them as “the other”. 


UPDATE 8/1/2013

After the first Anthony Weiner scandal ended his political career - we thought - speculation about Huma Abedin had died down.  However, Weiner decided to once again run for public office and a new scandal (a repeat of the old scandal) has received wide publicity.  Weiner deserves whatever negative publicity he gets, and hopefully his political career will be finished forever after this second scandal.  However, some individuals just can’t get over the fact that Weiner’s wife is a Muslim, and have to find a way to bring that fact into their reporting.  Haroon Moghul reports on the latest nonsense in the article Maureen Dowd’s Reductio Ad Islam in which he notes:

...  Why should we focus on the sideshow, and not on what New York needs, and is being offered? So I stayed silent.

Until I read Maureen Dowd’s Sunday New York Times column, that is. In it, she ascribes Abedin’s (unfathomable) fidelity to her husband, Anthony Weiner, who is the father of their child to—and here it comes, the very insight you paid through the paywall for—her Saudi Arabian upbringing, for that is where women are oppressed and learn helplessness. That makes complete sense!

Consider: Huma’s one-time boss, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stuck by a husband who did one worse, so far as these things can be weighed and inveighed against.  He cheated on his wife in his office, which happened to be our office, meaning the Oval Office. Still Clinton stuck by her husband for the very same reason, because she too was raised in Saudi Arabia. Don’t you know Muslim women are invariably oppressed? Don’t you know Hillary Clinton’s not a Muslim, except she should be, for Dowd’s column to deserve the space it received? (All this time we were worried about Obama.) Perhaps aware of the thinness of her causation, Dowd offers other specious possibilities.

Like, Clinton’s apology was more sincere. Or, his career more robust. His potential greater. (How far beyond President can you go?) Or she just made a choice. Abedin made a choice. We all make choices. Abedin’s mother made a choice to found one of Saudi Arabia’s first private women’s colleges, as New York magazine reported. Liberalism may be proud of its universalism, but it is not the only such tradition to claim global scope—nor is it immune from the occasional collapse into intense, unreflective parochialism.

What’s the difference between Dowd’s silliness and Rush Limbaugh’s (raised, incidentally, in Missouri, which, oh joyful juicy fate, is the ‘Show-Me State’)? The shock jock also blamed Abedin’s Muslimness for her choice to stay with her husband. She doesn’t have any power, says the former pain pill addict. Not that I believe I’ve any such right to comment on Abedin’s choice, just in case you thought I thought so, being the bearded fellow that I am, raised as I was in New England.

Not that I think it relevant, either. Whether Abedin’s inclination to remain with him speaks to his fitness for office is marginally relevant to the campaign he is running—what matters is where Weiner stands on germane concerns, such as those political and economic, although by this point the circus will consume everything and leave nothing in its wake. Reductio ad Islam? Dowd and Saudi Arabia have at least this in common: They like to deny women agency.  Only Dowd doesn’t have a childhood in Saudi Arabia to blame it on.

Hayes Brown reports on Think Progress Fox Panel Unearths ‘Real’ Anthony Weiner Story: A Muslim Brotherhood Conspiracy:

...  Fox News host Sean Hannity last week held a special “Saving America” edition of his show, in which he gathered a group of Fox contributors into one “audience-participation” panel. In one segment, the group opted to discuss the new scandal surrounding former congressman — and current mayoral candidate — Anthony Weiner and the lewd pictures and messages he’s sent to various women since his resignation in 2011. Brooke Goldstein of the Lawfare Project insisted that the media was overly focused on Weiner’s marital troubles. Rather than listing off some of the things New Yorkers really care about, though, Goldstein instead asked the hard questions about Weiner’s wife, and former top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin:

GOLDSTEIN: OK. What’s amazing to me is that we’re spending time debating Schmeckle-gate, OK? When Huma Abedin, who has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, who was connected to the chief financier of al-Qaeda, is his wife and has top security clearance.

HANNITY: She has a great point.

GOLDSTEIN: Why are we debating this?

“Actually, what Brooke points to, that’s the real Huma Abedin story,” agreed conservative radio host Monica Crowley. “It’s not about Weiner’s wiener.” The real story, Crowley insisted, is the fact that Huma is so closely linked to Clinton, who Crowley referred to as “soon to be maybe next president of the United States.”

The references to Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, however, aren’t based on fact. Instead, they only go back as far as 2012, and a conspiracy theory that House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) had a heavy hand in promoting. Bachmann along with several of her House colleagues sent a letter to the Departments of State and Justice, claiming that Abedin and other government personnel were secretly under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, planted to infiltrate the U.S. government.

In reality, the claim goes back to the conspiracy theories of Islamophobes likeFrank Gaffney, who has never managed to produce evidence of the charges against Abedin. Despite the insistence of many of her fellow Republicans that her attacks on Abedin were “nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack,” Bachmann stuck with the claim.

It would seem that despite that lack of proof, and the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood no longer is even in control of Egypt, the claim has a life of its own among the far-fringes of the right-wing. Numerous bloggers and pundits have called for the release of Abedin’s security clearance forms and just days ago the World Net Daily conspiracy theorist site referred to her as a “Muslim Brotherhood Princess.”

Abedin’s faith and ethnicity have been cited not only as proof of her lack of fidelity towards America recently, but also her reasoning for staying with Weiner despite his lack of fidelity towards her. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sunday published an article saying Abedin’s devotion was due to the fact that “Huma was raised in Saudi Arabia, where women are treated worse by men than anywhere else on the planet.” This simplistic view has already found itself roundly mocked online.

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Sheila Musaji is the founding editor of The American Muslim (TAM), published since 1989.  Sheila received the Council on American-Islamic Relations 2007 Islamic Community Service Award for Journalism,  and the Loonwatch Anti-Loons of 2011: Profiles in Courage Award for her work in fighting Islamophobia.  Sheila was selected for inclusion in the 2012 edition of The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims published since 2009 by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan.    Biography  You can follow her on twitter @sheilamusaji ( https://twitter.com/SheilaMusaji )


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