If ever the US waged an unnecessary war, it was Bill Clinton’s in ex-Yugoslavia.

Joseph Klein writes at Front Page:

A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husband’s administration and the Obama administration have developed.

President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt, “Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.” Noting that “it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia”,  Donovan added, “Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.”

Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict. We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt.

Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.

That Obama loves Islam, and has been an immense help to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to Iran with its ambition to become a nuclear power, can be accounted for. He is the son and step-son of Muslims, and lived among – and was schooled with – Muslims in Indonesia.

But why do the Clintons zealously woo, employ, aid and coddle the bellicose enemies of the USA and Western civilization?

President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist “rebels” against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011, “we just don’t know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces.”  In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafi’s rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s terrorist past but said they “express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics”.  Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed “peaceful” Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi,  praised al Qaeda members as “good Muslims” in a March 2011 interview?  If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.

As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was “complicated”, Blumenthal quoted a source “with access to the highest levels of the MB” as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, believed that “it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa’ida and other radical/terrorist groups”.

Radical terrorist groups, that is to say, which were in rivalry for hegemony with Morsi’s own group. (The MB claims to be non-violent in pursuing its jihad – but it launched the terrorist organization Hamas.)

Nevertheless, the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its bid to seek power in Egypt through a shaky electoral process. After Morsi’s election to the presidency, Hillary visited Egypt where Morsi warmly welcomed her and she expressed strong support for Egypt’s “democratic transition”.

However, the only real transition Morsi had in mind was to impose sharia law on the Egyptian people, the very antithesis of true democratic pluralism. Yet the Obama-Clinton gravy train of military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamist regime continued without any preconditions. Hillary Clinton herself and her State Department referred to the importance of the U.S.’s “partnership” with the Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime.

When Morsi was removed from power, after millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets to protest the increasingly theocratic regime, the Obama administration decided to suspend aid to the more secular successor military regime. The “partnership” was no more once the Islamists were swept out of office.

There were close ties between the Clinton Foundation and Morsi and his MB:

While Morsi was still president, the Clinton Foundation, which has taken millions of dollars in donations from Muslim majority governments and affiliated groups and individuals, invited Morsi to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative. This invitation was extended just a month after an individual named Gehad el-Haddad, who was working simultaneously for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Clinton Foundation in Cairo, left his Clinton Foundation job to work for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood full time. Fortunes changed for this individual, however, when, after Morsi was overthrown, Haddad was arrested for inciting violence and given a life sentence.

Hillary Clinton was willing to find a way round the First Amendment in her eagerness to please Islamic powers:

The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, also cooperated with the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to pass and implement a United Nations resolution that was intended to curb speech considered Islamophobic. Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC had sponsored in the past but was willing to have replaced. The truth, however, is that all we were seeing was old wine in new bottles. To make sure that the OIC was comfortable regarding the Obama administration’s intentions, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor”. She was trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press were safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims.

The signs of Hillary Clinton’s Islamist tilt as she runs for president include the sweepingly general and demonstrably false assertion in her tweet last November that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”.  She has obviously learned nothing from her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Neither is she willing to acknowledge that the terrorists whom she has called a “determined enemy” are jihadists animated by an ideology rooted in core Muslim teachings of the Koran and the Hadith …Is there something about the word “Muslim” in the Muslim Brotherhood and “Islamic” in the Islamic State that she is having problems understanding?

Perhaps, it is Hillary’s close association with Huma Abedin, her top campaign aide and confidante, who has had questionable links to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, which explains Hillary’s denial of the truth. If someone as close to Hillary as Huma Abedin, whom she apparently trusts with her life, is a Muslim, then how could any Muslim possibly have anything to do with terrorism?

Then again, perhaps Hillary’s willingness to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt is [explained by] all the money that the Clintons have received over the years from foreign donors in Muslim majority countries, including the Saudi government and affiliated groups and individuals. Hillary Clinton has also reached out for campaign donations from a pro-Iranian lobby group, the National Iranian American Council. Whatever human rights abuses are inflicted on people in these countries, it would be counterproductive to bite the hand that feeds you, in the Clintons’ way of thinking.

Finally, the Democratic Party itself has moved much further to the Left since the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, which has led to the broadening out of the pro-Islamist bias that began to take shape with Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia. As David Horowitz wrote in a January 8, 2016 article published by National Review:

Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.

And perhaps it is through both sentiment and venality that Hillary Clinton has helped and would continue to help Islam pursue its “holy war” against the USA and our civilization.

Khizr Kahn, the Muslim father of a US soldier who died in Iraq, spoke about his son’s death at the DNC convention. He did it to deliver a fierce rebuke to Donald Trump, who wants to take measures as president to protect Americans from Muslim terrorism.

Khizr Khan has worked long and hard to replace America the Land of Liberty and Tolerance with an America the Islamic Land of Submission and Intolerance.

Yet he claims that his son’s death in the Iraq war (in 2004) was a “sacrifice” that he, Khizr Kahn, made for the USA.  He accused Donald Trump of not doing this noble thing. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he said.

It’s not easy to make sense of that. In fact, it does not make sense.

Humayan Khan, the son, can certainly be said to have died in honorable military service to America. And logically, in all consistency, the father should be furious about it! One would expect to hear that Khizr Khan opposed his son’s joining the US army. We don’t know if he did. What we do know is that, in the light of Khizr’s career trying to change America into an Islamic country under sharia law, it is the height of hypocrisy and nothing short of astounding that he should claim his son’s death as his own “sacrifice” – for America the Land of Liberty and Tolerance. If he said he lost his son to that America, he would be making sense. Nasty sense, but sense.

His cynicism is matched and even surpassed by that of the Democratic Party – aka the Clinton Party – which has Khizr Khan appear on its platform at its convention to make that claim; to preen himself as someone whom America should hold in respect and honor because he made such a “sacrifice”; and to promote the claim as a “so there!” to Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump plans to exclude the likes of Khizr Khan, the promoters of sharia law, the would-be transformers of America the Land of Liberty and Tolerance into a sharia-ruled hell.

One of Khizr Kahn’s missions has been to bring as many Muslims into America as he can, towards achieving his objective of turning it into an Islamic country. As Trump threatens to make this impossible, of course Khan hates and dreads him. Khan will do anything to oppose him; even giving a lying and self-vaunting speech exploiting his own son’s honorable death at the DNC.

Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat discuss the issue, and give information about Khizr Khan’s life-long activity against America, in an article at their own website, from which we quote:

The Muslim who attacked Donald Trump … is a Muslim Brotherhood agent who wants to advance sharia law and bring Muslims into the United States. …

Khan wrote his Sharia Law supporting work in the eighties while he was in Saudi Arabia, the motherland of Wahhabism. This would never be possible unless Khan clearly had the support of the Saudi Wahhabist religious institution. …

He runs a law firm in New York City … According to the website, the law firm specializes in “immigration services”. …

Immigration services to Muslims, of course.

And – wouldn’t you have known it ! – there’s a Clinton connection going way back:

 Khan used to work for Hogan & Hartson and Lovells, which has ties to the Clinton Foundation:

Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show.

Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton’s campaign.

And there are more Saudi and Clinton ties:

Saudi interests with using Khan to advance Muslim immigration and advance Muslim Sharia is a lengthy subject which has ties to Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin as well. … The House of Saud  … the Abedins (Huma Abedin and family) … played a central role in using Muslim immigration to infiltrate the west with Wahhabi agenda. The House of Saud had used Huma’s father Sayed Zaynul Abedin’s work regarding [the Journal of ] Muslim Minority Affairs … as part of 29 works to construct a plan to conquer the U.S. with Islam.

It is obvious that Khan is upset, that a Trump victory will eliminate and destroy decades of hard work to bring in Islamic immigration into the United States which was spearheaded by agents in Saudi Arabia like [himself] and Huma Abedin and [her] family (Sayed Z. Abedin).

They recall other Muslims who joined the US army  – to “sacrifice” themselves not for America, but for its Islamic enemy:

In regards to his son and his sacrifice, on the other side of the coin, many were the “Muslim martyrs” who joined the US military. Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, for example, enlisted in the Special Forces of the US Army; he was a double agent for Al-Qaeda. How about Hasan K. Akbar, a Muslim American soldier who murdered and injured fifteen soldiers. There was Bowe Bergdahl, an American Muslim soldier who deserted his men to join the Taliban, a desertion which led to six American being ambushed and killed while they were on the search looking for him. And of course the example of Nidal Malik Hassan, who murdered fourteen Americans in cold blood in Fort Hood.

What about infiltration into the U.S. military like Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, a major Muslim thinker for the Muslim Minority Affairs, an icon of the Abedin family … who, while he served in U.S. military, called on arming Muslims to fight the U.S? Al-Alwani is an IMMA (Institute of Muslims Minority Affairs) favorite … whom Hillary’s aide Huma Abedin credits as the source for their doctrine (it can’t get any better than this). … [He] is an ardent anti-Semite who by the way, runs the United States Department of Defense program for training Muslim military chaplains in the U.S. military.

The Abedins’ Journal for Muslim Minority Affairs confirms that their program stems from these same extremist sources including the notorious Taha Jaber Al-Alwani as well as the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi.

Right! We found that the journal states:

“Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat”—the jurisprudence of Muslim minorities—is a legal doctrine introduced in the 1990s by Taha Jabir Al-Alwani and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi which asserts that Muslim minorities, especially those residing in the West, deserve a special new legal discipline to address their unique religious needs …

The “legal discipline” of sharia, he means of course. Yet Khan brandished a copy of the US Constitution at the DNC.

The Shoebat article sums up:

In a nutshell, the Muslim Minority Affairs program is part of a grand plan to destroy America from within, exactly as the Muslim Brotherhood planned, which was exposed in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

And the moral of the story is: Anyone whom the Clintons set before you as worthy of your sympathy and respect is bound to be a scoundrel, and probably an enemy of the USA.

*

This is from Western Journalism, by Gerry Urbanek:

According to his website*, Khan — an immigration lawyer — helps clients gain E-2 and EB-5 visas, which provide green cards to foreign investors along with their families. Yet this particular visa program is highly controversial and has been accused of allowing foreigners to buy residency.

“The E-2 and EB-5 are two of the most notoriously abused visa categories that essentially allow wealthy foreigners to buy their way to U.S. residency, and possibly citizenship, with a relatively modest investment,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director for the Center of Immigration Studies. “The EB-5 is literally a ‘citizenship for sale’ program in which a visa for a whole family can be bought for as little $500,000. … It’s an amazing deal.” …

In exchange for their $500,000 investment, immigrants who opt for this program receive green cards for themselves, their spouses and all of their children under the age of 21. …

Trump’s proposed policies on immigration are clearly a threat to this scofflaw trade.

*Khan’s website has been taken down.

The Democratic Party had gone wholly over to the dark side and had to be toppled from power.

But its only possible replacement, the GOP, had become so boring! Feeble, flaccid, sotto voce, forever falling as if by uncontrollable reflex into the posture of the pre-emptive cringe.

Until suddenly the busy, brash, boisterous, boastful Donald Trump arose in it and above it, roaring out terse insults and extravagant insincere praises.

Arose like a lion, like a leader. 

The man with the golden mane.

Whatever conservatives might hold against him is beside the point. He fights to win. And that is so new, so surprising, so revolutionary to Republican politicians that they can’t bring themselves to stand behind him even now that he’s their front runner.

But for as long as he is their front runner – perhaps all the way to the White House – they need to urge him on with thunderous (even if feigned!) enthusiasm.

David Solway writes at the New English Review:

The GOP failed to use its congressional majority to assert its foundational doctrines on the misguided assumption that it could woo Democrat voters away from their traditional loyalties or perceived entitlement advantages by presenting itself as the lite version of the opposition. …

But why would left-leaning voters go for Leftism Lite when the real thing is available to them?

Stark examples of Republican surrender abound.  Most recently, a Republican Congress signing on to Obama’s omnibus funding bill has brought itself into tawdry disrepute.  Another instance involves the infamous Corker Bill, which could just as easily have been engineered by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.  Senate Republicans refused to deal effectively with the deficiencies of the Corker Bill – a bill, as Andrew McCarthy explains, that was totally inadequate from the beginning to counter the Iranian nuclear threat.  The affair smacks of RINO business as usual.

As Andrew Bostom writes in a critical blog entry for April 15, 2015, Senate Republicans “have cravenly acquiesced to cynical, perverse Obama Administration bullying so as not to be labeled ‘warmongers’.”  Once again, we observe the standard right-wing capitulation from what should have been a position of strength.

One recalls, too, the shameful spectacle of John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, and the bloviating Lindsay Graham doing Obama’s bidding in Egypt in defense of the Muslim Brotherhood, or of McCain coming to the aid of Hillary Clinton’s Brotherhood-tainted adjunct, Huma Abedin, when she was challenged by Michele Bachmann.  Such complicity – voting with or parroting the enemy – is a surefire recipe for yet another Republican electoral defeat … 

In an interesting article for American Thinker, James Arlandson comes to the defense of the GOP establishment, which knows that society “moves by degrees”, that “incrementalism is the only way to retransform America”,  and that the party must appeal to a majority of undecided voters.  It is not an entirely convincing article.  Such temperateness as Arlandson recommends sabotaged Mitt Romney’s campaign and did not prevent the installation of the most radical president in American history, whose skin color did not overlay his bred-in-the-bone Marxism.  And we recall that Ronald Reagan, arguably the best president of the 20th century, was anything but temperate.

It comes down to this: Republicans need to change their game plan and go on the attack, abide by their core tenets, use their congressional majority to stymie a rogue president on every front without fear of electoral blowback, take on a corrupt and partisan media (as Donald Trump is doing, and as Romney did not when he failed to rein in CNN’s Candy Crowley’s illegitimate intervention during the second presidential debate between Romney and Obama), and stop being polite to their political enemies.  They must rally behind their nominated candidate, whoever that turns out to be, turn a deaf ear to the “strategies” of political advisers and so-called experts (who are habitually wrong about everything), counter the debilitating sickness of political correctness, tackle issues like Muslim immigration and cross-border infiltrations on a consensus basis, and, generally speaking, appeal to principle rather than to the opposition.

A tall order, but RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] will not win the 2016 election. Blue Republicans will not convince a partisan, cynical, wavering, or undecided electorate. Canada’s Conservatives lost the [recent] election in part because they shrank from being truly conservative.  Similarly, should the Republicans lose in November 2016, it will be because they failed to be truly republican.

Or perhaps because they’ll fail to follow a new leader who is only just republican enough, only just conservative enough, but is above all a mover and shaker, who could lead them to victory.

Will he? Or will the sober and serious Marco Rubio do it? Or the strong steady Ted Cruz? One of them must.

Must beat the Democratic nominee, whether the crook or the commie.

In any case, the unfolding drama is exciting.

An exciting GOP at last!

(Hat-tip for the Solway link to our commenter cogito)

… high minded skulduggery and narrow minded illusion.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her then-advisers to foment unrest among Palestinian citizens and spark protests in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, according to emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.

In a Dec, 18, 2011, email, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider a plan to restart then-stalled peace negotiations by kickstarting Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.

Pickering described the effort as a potential “game changer in the region”, recommending that the United States undertake a clandestine campaign to generate unrest. …

“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote.

“This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless,” he continued. “Women can and ought to be at the center of these demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.”

Palestinian women, he noted, are less likely than men to resort to violence.

“It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote, comparing the effort to the protests in Egypt that deposed former leader Hosni Mubarak. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”

So Palestinian men, in the “humble” view of this presumptuous man, cannot be expected to demonstrate non-violently because “much too soon” they will use force. Indeed, “their male culture comes close to requiring it”.

And yet he thinks it perfectly possible to put “peace back in the center” of their “aspirations”?

They have shown no sign of wanting peace for 68 years, but if the women can be stirred up to protest against something-or-other, suddenly peace will pop into their minds?

Pickering noted that the administration must keep its role in the demonstration a secret, so as not to aggravate ties with Israel.

And he thought Mossad would never find out that the Obama administration was once again up to its dirty tricks in the land (like its efforts to influence elections, which were not kept secret for long)?

“Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behind it for reasons you will understand better than anyone,” he wrote, suggesting that the government enlist liberal non-profit groups in Israel. “I believe third parties and a number of NGOs [non-government organizations] on both sides would help.”

Cannot be seen to be doing it, but do it without compunction. Because – you see, Hillary, who will understand this better than anyone – it is for the great good of reviving a non-existent “peace process”, and such high-minded goodness can be allowed to resort to low-down duplicity and subterfuge.

To the Left, the ends always justify the means, though the ends may be unrealistic, and the means predictably foul.

As relations with Israel remained tense, another Clinton confidant, Anne Marie Slaughter, sent a staff-wide email to Clinton staffers recommending that they undertake a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign aimed at convincing US millionaires and billionaires to donate significant portions of their wealth to the Palestinian cause.

The effort, Slaughter wrote in the September 2010 email, could help shame Israel.

“Shame Israel”. There’s a high minded plan.

“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” Slaughter wrote. “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”

A pledge, that is, on the part of “millionaires and billionaires” around the world, not the Palestinians.

Slaughter, who described the effort as a “crazy idea”, suggested tapping the “Clinton fundraising network” in order to raise the money needed.

“With even 30 calls to the right people in the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial enough amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination,” she wrote in the email, which was sent to top Clinton staffers, including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

Note the assumption that “the public imagination” is readily stirred for the Palestinians. These plotters round Hillary Clinton, like the whole of the Obama administration, seem to have been marvelously insulated from public opinion.

We have to assume that either these plots were not put into effect, or they were tried and failed. And we can see why Hillary, having such advisers and given such advice on top of being the ideologically twisted being that she is, failed totally as Secretary of State to achieve anything good for her country, but did a great deal of continuing harm.

Hillary Clinton did no good and a lot of harm when she was Secretary of State. The chaos that is Libya is her most notorious “achievement”.

But she did manage to use her position to make a great deal of money.

Now we have nothing against money. On the contrary, unpopular though it apparently is among the moralists of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, global warming “scientists”, and Democratic candidates for high office, we like it.

So it is not the riches of the Clintons we are against. It is how they acquired them.

The Romans used to say, “Pecunia non olet” – money doesn’t stink.

But the Clintons’ money actually does. It stinks of corruption.

The Clintons used the State Department as their own private team of enablers for their artful dodging. 

The Washington Times reports:

Back when they occupied the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton boasted that Americans “got two for the price of one”. The folks in Ireland have a good sense now what that actually costs.

As Irish businesses were arranging for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to make one of her last official visits to Ireland in December 2012, her husband, Bill, suddenly landed a half-million speaking gig for his foundation on the Emerald Island, according to newly released emails from the conservative group Citizens United that show the business of State and the business of Bill were often intertwined.

A review of Mrs. Clinton’s official travel and the former president’s for-pay speechmaking, in fact, found several instances like Ireland in which the couple passed through the same foreign country — one for government business, the other for profit or charity — within a few short weeks of each other.

We looked into the Clintons’ “charity”. How much of the Clinton Foundation’s revenue goes to charity? And what charities? For answers, put these titles into our search slot: Touched by the Clintons; What needs to be known about the Clintons’ charities; Floating up now from a sewer called Clinton; The great good works and wonky dilemmas of William J. Clinton. 

For example, Mr. Clinton gave a speech to a prestigious nonprofit in Sweden for $425,000 in May 2012, and Mrs. Clinton visited the country less than a month later to promote a Clean Air convention. On the same trip, Mr. Clinton made a stop in Denmark to give a paid speech to World Management Limited. Mrs. Clinton visited Denmark the following month for a Green Partnership for Growth event.

In June 2012, Mr. Clinton gave a $450,000 speech to YPY Holdings in France. Less than a month later, Mrs. Clinton was in the country for official business. In August of that year, Mr. Clinton made a trip to Brazil and pocketed $850,000 for two days’ work at two different venues. Mrs. Clinton was in the country two months earlier for a United Nations conference on sustainable development.

The amount Mr. Clinton commanded for speeches seemed to rise after Mrs. Clinton became America’s top diplomat.

Of the 13 speeches for which Mr. Clinton personally collected $500,000 or more each, 11 were while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state, according to federal disclosure records. Others, such as the donation Mr. Clinton scored while in Ireland, went directly to the Clinton Foundation.

State officials on government time also spent a significant amount of time vetting Mr. Clinton’s private activities, raising a question of what benefit taxpayers received in return.

Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle at State, including Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, often were involved in the discussions, emails show.

For instance, Mr. Clinton scheduled a trip to Africa several weeks prior to Mrs. Clinton, on official business to promote the foundation’s charitable works there. The trip was cleared through the State Department, which had to check with its embassies to ensure there would not be any problems.

“Cheryl: our embassies in both Kampala and Pretoria have informed me that they see no/no problems (with their host governments or otherwise) with President Clinton’s visit to Uganda and South Africa two/three weeks before the Secretary,” Johnnie Carson, a State official, wrote to Ms. Mills.

Ms. Mills forwarded the email to Amitabh Desai, a Clinton Foundation official, who replied: “Thanks. I also think we need a talking point for the media who ask about the timing of their trips.”

For paid speeches that presented bad optics, Mr. Clinton would ask the State Department whether the money could be donated to his charity rather than taking it personally.

In June 2012, Mr. Desai wrote an email to Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin, along with other top State Department officials asking whether Mr. Clinton could give a speech in Congo — which included a photo line with past dictators — for $650,000.

“This did not clear our internal vet, but [Mr. Clinton] wants to know what state thinks of it if he took 100% for the foundation,” Mr. Desai wrote.

That same month, Mr. Desai wrote the same group at State a similar email, concerned that a group that invited the former president to give a speech for $200,000, the Luca International Group on behalf of the U.S. China Energy Summit, didn’t check out.

“Would [the State Department] have any concerns about [Mr. Clinton] taking this and directing the proceeds to the Clinton Foundation?” Mr. Desai asked. “Don Walker is concerned about the host and agrees with us it’s strange we can’t get any more information on this host and they have no track records of prior events.”

Mr. Clinton never made those speeches, but it serves as an example of ways Mr. Clinton thought of skirting State Department ethics determinations for foundation gains. The foundation also asked in May whether the State Department would have any concerns about an invitation he received on behalf of North Korea.

“Decline it,” Ms. Mills abruptly wrote to Mr. Desai. But that didn’t stop a follow-up question.

“This came via Tony Rodham [Mrs. Clinton’s brother]. So we would be grateful for any specific concerns that we could share, beyond just saying it would be concerning for [the State Department],” Mr. Desai wrote.

“If he needs more, let him know his wife knows and I am happy to call him secure when he is near a secure line,” Ms. Mills wrote back.

The Ireland trips included a fascinating web of private and public interests.

In 2012, Mrs. Clinton’s final year in office, Irish racing executive JP McManus was looking for a high-profile keynote speaker to help him hand out the All-Ireland Scholarships his charity donates annually at Limerick University. He considered Mr. Clinton to be the perfect choice.

Mr. McManus secured Mr. Clinton’s interest “with the help of friends”. “I got a friend of mine to make an inquiry,” he told the Limerick Leader in an article published Nov. 20, 2012, a few days after Mr. Clinton’s arrival. Mr. McManus’ charity also donated as much as $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, to secure the endeavor, records show.

One of Mr. McManus’ friends is Kieran McLoughlin, CEO of the Ireland Funds, who was set to host Mrs. Clinton as a keynote speaker at one of its events the following month in Belfast. It was Mrs. Clinton’s last trip to a foreign country as secretary of state.

Not only did Mr. McLoughlin attend Mr. Clinton’s speech in Limerick, according to press reports, but in the months prior, Mr. McLoughlin and Mr. McManus also celebrated in Chicago to kick off the Ryder Cup, and in Morocco, where Mr. McManus was honored by the Ireland Funds for his charitable work.

Request for comment from Mr. McManus’ charity went unreturned. A spokeswoman for the Ireland Funds said Mr. McLoughlin attended the Limerick University speech as a guest and had no involvement whatsoever in the organization of the event. The charity did give Mr. McManus a $100,000 grant in 2011 to support the work of the Limerick Enterprise Development Partnership, of which the McManus Foundation is a lead supporter. None of the funding given to Mr. McManus was used to help attract Mr. Clinton to the Limerick event, the spokeswoman said.

(Our emphasis.) So the $1 mllion that Mr. McManus’s charity donated to the Clinton Foundation (ostensibly to go through it to some other charity which the McManus charity could easily have donated to directly) came from a different compartment of Mr. McManus’s charity’s cash box? Money not after all being fungible? So no one is lying?

At the same time Mr. Clinton’s speaking engagement in Ireland was being arranged, Irish interests were pursuing Mrs. Clinton for two other opportunities: an official state visit in December 2012 and a women’s forum in 2014, after she left government.

The web of connections between the Clintons’ public and private interests was complicated throughout the Ireland conversations.

For instance, Ms. Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, was arranging the December 2012 trip for the secretary to speak before the Ireland Fund on behalf of the State Department as part of an official trip. At the same time, though, she also was working for a private firm, Teneo Group, that was involved in the event, emails show.

The Women in Business in Northern Ireland group, seeking to get Mrs. Clinton to speak at a forum in 2014, was simultaneously talking with President Clinton’s foundation about getting more involved in its charitable work.

During those conversations, executives of the women’s business lobby asked a top official of Mr. Clinton’s foundation whether they could arrange to be invited to Mrs. Clinton’s December 2012 trip so they could “share our ambitions” with the secretary.

“Just wondering if you had any more information on the Clintons trip to Ireland,” one executive wrote the foundation. “We would really like to get involved at some level so your help here, if possible, would be great.”

The foundation’s solution? They forwarded the women’s group’s request to Ms. Abedin at the State Department.

The circular chain linked together the State Department, Mr. Clinton’s private charity and Mrs. Clinton’s future private speaking engagement.

Kent Cooper, a former federal election regulator and respected political ethics analyst, said the blurred lines between State and the foundation in the Clinton world validated the axiom that “there are many pockets in a politician’s coat to line”. 

“There are the official pockets, the political pockets, in this case the foundation’s pockets and then their own private pocketbooks, and you can see how special interests subtly work all of them with invitations, pressure and money to try to get what they want,” he said.

“There seem to have been no ethical boundaries or double checks on conflicts of interest between the activities of the secretary of state as a government official, the fundraising of a private foundation, the fees of a private consultant, and the personal income of a former government official, that being the former president.”

We like this column by Mark Steyn so much, and find it so funny, that we’re quoting it in full.

Our only comments are these:

We fervently hope not to have any Democrat succeed Obama to the presidency.

As America is at war, a president is needed who knows what’s going on in the outer world and can be a first-rate commander-in-chief. And such a person is more likely to be a man. (If the Republican Party had a Margaret Thatcher to offer for election it would be different, but it doesn’t. Such people are very rare.)

“Ignore the noise – Clinton will win in 2016,” we are assured by a columnist in Hillary’s journalistic namesake The Hill. “The email flap will be gone soon enough.”

That’s probably the way to bet. Rightie pundits are going on about government-issue Blackberries, insecure servers, federal record-keeping, the law, national security, peripheral stuff like that. Leftie pundits are saying: yawn, nobody cares, it’s never gonna catch fire, give it up. Everyone implicitly agrees that Hillary did something she shouldn’t and that her justification for doing so is ridiculous. The only disagreement is whether it makes any difference. The Hill‘s Fernando Espuelas says no:

Clinton has a built-in advantage — her gender… Some percentage of Americans, likely a large one, would like to cast a historic vote. When polling points to Americans wanting “change”, what bigger change than a woman as president?

A change to a competent citizen-executive whose administration spends within its means, ceases obstructing economic growth and middle-class prosperity, and restores American influence in the world?

Oh, well. One takes his point: Most other citizens of developed and not-so-developed societies cast those “historic votes” long ago – Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, India, Dominica, Jamaica, Guyana, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, Turkey, Portugal, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Transnistria …

At the time of those “historic votes” on a good half of that list, “gender” was not “a built-in advantage” but a built-in disadvantage that skilled and nimble female candidates had to be exceptional to overcome.

If I follow Mr Espuelas correctly, he’s saying that America is getting round to its “historic vote” so late that “gender” is now such an advantage that any old female candidate can be dragged across the finish line, no matter how shopworn, wooden, charmless, tin-eared and corrupt.

Maybe. But, even so, Hillary Clinton is still a severe test of that thesis. Charles Krauthammer detects “Early-Onset Clinton Fatigue”. Whether that is yet afflicting the electorate, it certainly seems to have gripped the candidate. At that press conference, Hillary seemed to be going through the motions. Flush with Saudi cash and a well-oiled shakedown Rolodex, Clinton Worldwide Inc has no reason not to run for president, but apparently no compelling reason to run. When the candidate runs into trouble, grizzled drooling attack dogs from the Nineties – Lanny Davis, James Carville – are loosed from their chains and limp dutifully from the Old Pooch Home to bare their remaining fang for their mistress.

Is there anyone new, young, talented willing to defend Hillary? I mean, other than Huma [Abedin], the only woman in America whose marriage rivals the exhibitionist creepiness of the Clintons in their heyday.

Let’s take The Hill‘s chap at his word: “Gender” will trump whatever stiff the Republican primary season throws up. In that case, why not run a woman who isn’t quite so bloody awful at running? Someone younger, someone whose principal selling point isn’t her husband’s surname, someone with actual accomplishments and a political philosophy? She doesn’t have to be that much younger, or accomplished. Elizabeth Warren is two years younger than Hillary, and her principal accomplishments are TARP and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, neither of which is my cup of tea. But that’s two more accomplishments than Secretary Clinton can claim. And okay, she’s not the most riveting public speaker, but she’s Tom Jones at Vegas next to a speak-your-weight machine in a pantsuit. And yes, Senator Fauxcahontas Crockagewea Warren’s got her own scandal – in that she got hired as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color” on the basis of a dubious claim to be one thirty-second Cherokee and having contributed Cole Porter and the Duchess of Windsor’s favorite crab dish from an upscale Manhattan restaurant to a cookbook of authentic tribal recipes.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, isn’t that kind of a charmingly amateur, sweetly naive racket? It’s a small-town home-cooked mom’n’pop racket compared to the 24/7 industrial-scale multinational Saudi-kissing pedophile-jetting rackets of Clinton Global Mega-Racket Inc,

As I said, Senator Warren is a mere two years younger than Secretary Clinton, which means, if she’s ever going to run for president, it has to be now. Why not go for it? Wouldn’t Democrats like to elect a real first female head of government like Thatcher or Merkel or Golda Meir or all those Scandinavians? Why should all those Americans itching to cast that “historic vote” have to have it tainted and thrown away on dynastic succession? How “historic” can your vote really be when, insofar as Hillary’s “running” at all, she’s running as if she’s already won and she’s just running out the clock till the coronation? Are Democrat women so cowed and subservient they’re just going to have the House of Saud’s candidate shoved down their throats and meekly be driven to the polls in theirs burqas by Lanny Davis?

Well, yes. Probably. Okay, definitely.

But we can always dream. And my bet is that, after Tuesday, a lot of Democrats are dreaming. A Hillary presidency is an “historic first”: not the first female president, but the second Clinton president, and the second-rate Clinton president.

Warren-Sharpton

(Picture from PowerLine)

If it is possible for the US to have a worse president than Obama, it would be Hillary Clinton.

The two of them have already embarrassed their country more than enough.

She’s done nothing to boast of in her long career as the wife of a politician, her very short career as a senator, and her disastrous career as Secretary of State. But she’s done much to be ashamed of. The worst thing she did was set up a death trap  – what difference does it make whether she meant to or not? – for a US Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Then she lied about it. Blamed an obscure amateur video maker. Weird!

Her speeches are flat, dull, unmemorable – inevitably so, because she’s a dull thinker. There have been, and will be, countless speeches by other politicians just as boring and forgettable, but none could ever be more so.

This is from PowerLine, by John Hinderaker:

The aftermath [of the appalling mess in Benghazi] is embarrassing, too. Hillary told the father of one of the murdered SEALs that the administration would stop at nothing to bring that lousy video maker to justice. The man must have thought she was a lunatic. Later, according to an eyewitness, Hillary erupted in rage against a Republican Congressman who suggested that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Which, of course, she knew it was shortly after it began. Is it bad to be a cowardly liar? Not if you are a Democratic presidential candidate, evidently.

The aftermath didn’t end with the administration’s initial lies, either. It continues to this day. One might think that a Secretary of State who lost an ambassador on her watch would stop at nothing to make sure that the terrorists who carried out the attack were killed or otherwise punished. (Killed, preferably.) If this is a subject in which Hillary has taken interest, she has shown no sign of it.

And this is from Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield:

This week CBS joined NBC and CNN in the Hillary entertainment business. While NBC airs a 4-hour miniseries produced by James D. Stern, the son of a top Bill Clinton donor, whom the New York Times accused of pushing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy eight years ago, CNN will air a documentary about Hillary and CBS is developing Madame Secretary, a television series about a female Secretary of State.

The biggest challenge for all these projects is how small a figure they have to hang so many hours of dead air on.

The NBC series will “recount Clinton’s life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member.” Tellingly, the political side of her life comes last. The CBS series will cover “the personal and professional life of a maverick female Secretary of State as she drives international diplomacy, wrangles office politics and balances a complex family life.”

It always comes back to the family life, because what else is there? Turn off the cameras and sitting there is the compulsively dishonest and corrupt wife of a compulsively dishonest and corrupt former president. The wife of a dishonest, but popular, president, running for his old job, may have a slight Latin American or Middle Eastern flavor, but it’s not even Evita; let alone Hillary of Arabia.

Hillary’s closest supporters don’t have much to say about her weak tenure as Secretary of State. Once you get past the usual material about serving as a role model for girls and facing the challenges of being a wife and a mother, there are very few specific mentions of what Hillary actually did while in office.

Hillary took a lot of trips and spent a lot of money on art in embassies and green energy, but you couldn’t find her actual accomplishments with a microscope.

The only two moments of her diplomatic career that anyone remembers is the bungled Russian reset button and her clumsy participation in the Benghazi cover-up. Even the most favorable reading of both events, a misspelled gimmicky button and blaming her subordinates for not providing adequate security funding which helped lead to the murder of four Americans, don’t make for much of a resume.

After Hillary stepped out of the State Department to begin her 2016 campaign, the medals and awards came pouring in almost as fast as the television shows.

The National Constitution Center awarded her a Liberty Medal because she “traveled to more countries than any other Secretary of State” and “used social media to engage citizens”. That’s not the bio of a Secretary of State. It sounds like a celebrity getting some meaningless UN humanitarian award for tweeting about Rwanda.

The National Defense University Foundation will follow that up by giving her the Patriot Award in the Ronald Reagan Building in order to celebrate “the American spirit of patriotism” which she embodies in some unspecified way.

The ridiculous parade of awards and shows is a rerun of how Obama, an uninteresting Illinois politician, was transformed into the most interesting figure in American politics through obsessive attention and hysterical praise. But Hillary Clinton, who will be pushing seventy by the time her big moment in the sun arrives, has fewer excuses for needing to slap this much greasepaint on an undistinguished resume.

The positions that will be used as props in her quest for higher office came to her only by way of being married to the former President of the United States. And it’s impossible to find anything revolutionary that she did with those positions, except use them as launching pads for an office she was even less qualified for. …

There is nothing factual in Hillary’s background to justify her inevitability as a candidate. Her time as Senator and Secretary of State was a shapeless blur of undistinguished mediocrity culminating in one final bloody disaster.

And Dan Calabrese writes about Hillary’s dishonesty:

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her [untrue] story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

He goes on to tell a little known story of what he mildly terms her “unethical behavior”. One to add to a long list. Find it here.

And this is an extract from Discover the Networks’ survey of Hillary’s deplorable career. (The whole survey is a must-read.)

In July 2012, author and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy noted the following items about the relationship between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Muslim Brotherhood …

• The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.

• The State Department announced [in November 2011] that the Obama administration would be ‘satisfied’ with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

• The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

• On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official.

In the summer of 2012,controversy arose over the fact that Secretary Clinton’s closest aide and advisor, Huma Abedin, has longstanding intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then came Benghazi …

As the prurient news media have made known around the planet, a lubricious narcissist named Anthony Weiner persistently and compulsively stands for public office while disseminating pictures of his private parts, by means of the world wide web, in the hope of setting young women on fire with lust for him – figuratively speaking. His sexual perversion would be of little interest to the world if it were not for the odd fact that, despite being in public disgrace, he is standing – sometimes in underwear – as a Democratic candidate for election to the office of Mayor of New York.

What is less known and hardly at all discussed is that his wife, Huma Abedin, has helped to set a part of the planet on fire literally, along with her bosom friend Hillary Clinton. (See also here and here and here.)

Diana West asks, most pertinently, in her Townhall column today:

Isn’t the Abedin-Clinton national security story at least as newsworthy as Weiner’s private parts?

Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert.

Abedin is also a veritable Muslim Brotherhood princess. As such, the ideological implications of her actions — plus her long and privileged access to US policy-making through Hillary Clinton — must be considered, particularly in the context of national security. …

If the Abedin-Muslim Brotherhood story rings any bells, it is probably because of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Last summer, Bachmann, along with four other House Republicans, raised the issue of Huma Abedin among other examples of possible Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain. They asked inspectors general at five departments, including the State Department, to investigate their concerns, but nothing happened – nothing, that is, except that Bachmann was crucified, by Democrats and Republicans alike, for asking urgently important questions about national security.

This made the entire subject, already taboo, positively radioactive – with Huma Abedin becoming the poster victim of this supposed “McCarthyism” redux.*

Someone who has looked into “the Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain”, in particular Huma Abedin’s amazing success in becoming chief adviser to the Secretary of State, is Andrew C. McCarthy.

He writes at National Review Online:

Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization.

And yet Huma married a Jew. A Clinton-favored Jew. Bill Clinton performed the wedding ceremony. Who would believe this story if it were fiction?

When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book called Women in Islam that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote Foreign Policy). …

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood — many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program … a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority”. The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing. …

The MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was . . . Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. [He] is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [aforementioned] Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

While Huma Abedin “served as one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top staffers and advisers at the State Department”, it became US foreign policy to support the Muslim Brotherhood. 

During that time, the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel.

To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

• The State Department had an emissary in Egypt who trained operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
• The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
• On a trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta then governing the country, to surrender power to the parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the then–newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi had proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States . . . the group’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

As more recent events remind us, this is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

When a handful of House conservatives tried to draw the attention of the State Department’s inspector general to some of these matters – wondering how on earth someone with Ms. Abdein’s background could have qualified for a top-secret security clearance – they were castigated by the Obama White House and the Beltway Republican establishment.

As reaffirmed in the last 24 hours, Ms. Abedin’s connections to prominent Islamic-supremacist figures and groups are deemed unsuitable for public discussion – Egyptians may be able to eject the Muslim Brotherhood, but in today’s Washington it is raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood that gets you run out of town.

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

Andrew McCarthy ends his article on a note of justified outrage, which we share with him.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

This political story is extremely obscene. Yet the prurient news media will not tell it.

* Diana West has recently published an important book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press, New York), in which she demonstrates that the demonized Joseph McCarthy was right to have done what he did.

Americans, Gallup tells us, admire Hillary Clinton more than any other woman in the world — again. This latest accolade marks the 17th time Gallup has found Clinton to be the Most Admired Woman (MAW?) since she became first lady nearly 20 years ago. … And therein lies America’s cosmic flaw. A country that could time and again embrace Hillary Clinton as its MAW has lost its mind or its memory or both.

So Diana West writes at Townhall. She goes on to remind Hillary Clinton’s numerous fans why their admiration is misplaced. We quote in part:

Does the phrase “congenital liar” tinkle any bells? … As conjured by the late New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, the phrase described the then-first lady for her shameless prevarications. These included what sure looked like bribery (“cattle futures”), defrauding taxpayers (“Whitewater”), obstructing justice — or, rather, “finding” her Rose Law Firm billing records (under subpoena for two years) just days after the statute of limitations ran out — among other corrupt behaviors that must have slightly suppressed Hillary-admiration that same year. The phrase remains apt.

“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Clinton declared on the presidential campaign trail in 2008, describing a 1996 trip to Bosnia. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down (chuckles) to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” It was a vivid but debunkable whopper, as CBS footage of the event proved. In reality, Clinton, accompanied by daughter Chelsea, made her ceremonial way into Bosnia through a warm throng marked by smiling faces and a kiss from a local girl — not bullets. Admirable?

On a more nationally significant level, Clinton recently supported President Obama’s Big Lie that a movie trailer of “Innocence of Muslims” on YouTube “resulted” (her word) in the September attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya — a concerted falsehood for which neither Clinton nor Obama nor former CIA Director David Petraeus has yet answered. Even several days after intelligence agencies determined that a planned assault, not a video-driven protest, had taken place, Clinton went so far as to promise a grieving Charles Woods, father of slain former SEAL Tyrone Woods, that “we” were going to have the video maker “arrested and prosecuted.” Why was Clinton still perpetuating the false narrative that the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment, not Islamic jihad, had resulted in the attack? Was that admirable? …

Meanwhile, the video maker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was indeed arrested and swiftly prosecuted, and is now serving one year in jail for “parole violations.” His incarceration, however, is better understood as punishment for violating the Islamic ban on free speech about Islam. … The fact is, Hillary Clinton has worked assiduously with the Islamic bloc nations, known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to promote Islamically correct speech codes through the so-called Istanbul Process. The goal of this process — and the goal of transnational Islam — is to implement Shariah speech codes via U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which seeks to criminalize “defamation” — free speech — about Islam. In leading this drive against free speech, Hillary Clinton is actually leading a drive against the First Amendment.

Most Americans don’t know about the Istanbul Process, let alone how Islamic speech codes are unconstitutional, but it is this policy against free speech that may stand as Clinton’s enduring legacy as secretary of state. It is of a piece with having presided over, first, the shredding of U.S. alliances with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and then supporting jihadist factions and organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, now implementing Islamic law across the Middle East. This, of course, is President Obama’s policy, but Hillary Clinton has been an active team player.

Another aspect of this same foreign policy Clinton has spearheaded is the launch of the Global Counterterrorism Forum. The forum’s roster of 29 nations plus the European Union is stunning for its exclusion of Israel, a leading counterterrorism force as much as it is a leading terrorism victim. But not so, according to Islamic definitions. Knowingly or not, as a leader of this forum, one-third of whose members come from the Islamic bloc, Clinton has accepted the Arab League and OIC definitions of terrorism, which both deny the existence of Israeli victims (sometimes U.S. soldiers) and legitimize the terrorism of Hamas, a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah. …

What influences have led Clinton to formulate or follow such policies? … It is hard not to wonder about the input of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, a young woman with well-established familial and personal ties to Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups (including a “charity” linked to al-Qaida and a group banned in Israel for ties to Hamas). Indeed, what may be most astounding and mysterious about Clinton’s whole public tenure is how Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work so closely with the secretary of state.

And further to all that, the burning question is: what has Hillary Clinton ever done that is admirable? 

We see a logical link between the appalling murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, and the infiltration of the Obama administration by the Muslim Brotherhood.* 

There can be little doubt that diplomatic secrets – the Ambassador’s whereabouts, and the location of the “safe-house” belonging to the consulate – were betrayed from inside the legation. (How else would a “safe-house” become known?) Also, that there was a policy of trusting local Arab security personnel to guard America’s representatives and their staff. How could it come about that legations in that part of the world, recently emerged from violent uprisings and still in a state of instability and internal strife, should be exposed to such obvious risk? Why were those Marines – too few of them – who were nominally on guard at the Cairo embassy not issued with ammunition? These policy decisions issued from the State Department. The head of the State Department is Hillary Clinton, and her closest adviser, Huma Abedin, is intricately  and intimatetly involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, the  jihadist organization that has come to power in Egypt.**

But, you might point out, Ambassador Stevens was killed by al-Qaeda, not the Muslim Brotherhood. (See our post The Gitmo alumnus, September 28, 2012.) Yes, but observe  that the imam who preached protest in Cairo against the “anti-Muhammad” movie deliberately shown to Egyptian audiences for that very purpose is  the brother of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. (For a full account of this, see our post Al-Qaeda incited the Islamic world to riot, burn and kill, September 16, 2012.) Does that not suggest that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are co-operating with each other?***

Are we alone in finding it irresistible to “connect the dots” and see a picture emerging of the worst betrayal of America in all its history?

The administration has become tangled in a web of deceit in trying to cover up what really happened in Benghazi. The motive for the cover-up is ascribed to President Obama’s wish to claim that the “War on Terror” is over; that with the killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda was defeated – while in fact al Qaeda is bigger, stronger, and operating lethally in many more countries than it was before bin Laden’s death.

The estimable Rep. Peter King puts this argument forward in this video:

It may be, however, that the really terrible secret Obama and his henchmen are trying to cover up is that the betrayal stems not just locally from the inside of the US legation in Libya, but from Foggy Bottom and the White House.

*A thoroughly researched study of this, The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration by Frank Gaffney, is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and is available from them.

**Huma Abedin’s close connections to the Muslim Brotherhood are documented in Frank Gaffney’s study.

*** Go here to read about every al-Qaeda leader’s membership of the Muslim Brotherhood.