Fancy pants journalists are holding Donald Trump accountable for every single article his new campaign executive ever published at Breitbart News. So doesn’t basic fairness dictate that they ask Hillary Clinton about her own top aide working 12 years for a fanatical Muslim journal while it apologized for domestic violence, 9/11 and rape?
Edited, then and now, by her own mother!
And please, everybody, don’t embarrass yourselves by calling the New York Post bombshell revelations today about Huma Abedin guilt by association. Unless, of course, you voiced similar objections about the mainstream media trashing Donald Trump because as a 27-year-old working for his father’s company in 1973 he got sued for housing discrimination.
Just address the facts—for a change. Investigative journalist Paul Sperry details how shortly after Hillary’s acclaimed 1995 speech at the United Nations conference that “women’s rights are human rights” the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs published multiple articles “taking Clinton’s feminist platform apart, piece by piece.”
“At the time,” he reports Huma, an intern for Clinton, was an assistant editor. She “continued to work for the journal through 2008.”
And what a paper trail she left, at least for anybody who finds Steve Bannon’s newsworthy.
In 1996, the Journal, which Vanity Fair calls an Abedin “family business,” published a piece, “Women’s Rights are Islamic Rights,” saying that that the sexy attire of women “directly translates into unwanted results of sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility and indirectly promote violence against women.”
The same article warned against “the dangers of alternative lifestyles”—the quaint term for homosexuality back then—and trashed working mothers. “A conjugal family established through a marriage contract between a man and a woman, and extended through procreation is the only definition of family a Muslim can accept,” wrote the author, identified by Sperry only as a Saudi official with the Muslim World League. “Pushing [mothers] out into the open labor market is a clear demonstration of a lack of respect of womanhood and motherhood.”
In her own January 1996 article, Huma’s mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, the editor-in-chief, called the feminist agenda espoused by Hillary and other UN speakers entirely contrary to Islam. Women do best barefoot and pregnant at home in the kitchen, she essentially argued.
“’Empowerment’ of women does more harm than benefit the cause of women or their relations with men. Acknowledging the very central role women play in procreation, child-raising and homemaking, Islam places the economic responsibility of supporting the family primarily on the male members.”
The elder Abedin also urged folks to be less judgmental about wife beaters. “More men are victims of domestic violence than women,” she claimed. “If we see the world through ‘men’s eyes’ we will find them suffering from many hardships and injustices.”
Sperry says that Huma, “continued to work for her mother’s journal through 2008.” She was listed on the masthead as “assistant editor” in 2002 when her mother pretty much called 9/11 the chickens coming home to roost for the United States.
“The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions,” she wrote. “It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve.”
How lovely.
Of course, just because Huma, likely to be Hillary’s White House chief of staff, worked for her mother’s journal when it published all sorts of putrescent articles doesn’t mean she necessarily endorses these views today or even had contemporaneous knowledge of the pieces.
Still, shouldn’t somebody at least ask her about it?
TalkingPointsMemo.com founder Josh Marshall, who last week pleasured himself immensely by seizing on the Trump-Breitbart-Steve Bannon connection, today ignored inquiries about the Huma revelations.
But New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, who unlike Marshall knows how to harshly criticize Trump without sounding like a Stalinist android, told the Washington Gadfly, ”I think it’s legit for legit reporters to ask legit questions everyday of every year of everyone in public life. In the same way that no one is above the law, (too bad that doesn’t usually apply), people should be responsible for what they put out there whether that’s in word, deed or misdeed.”