Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison is still the front-runner to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, even as he is reported to be ducking interviews about his past praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
However, establishment media are sure to ignore other parts of Ellison’s résumé, such as his false attacks on former Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and his defense of longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
In 2012, Bachmann and several other Republicans in Congress raised questions about Abedin, then one of Secretary of State Clinton’s closest advisers, and her connections to groups that support Islamic terrorism.
Rep. Keith Ellison helped lead the charge attacking Bachmann. In a July 2012 letter released to the public, Rep. Ellison obscured the facts about Abedin’s connections to groups such as the Muslim World League that Hillary Clinton herself has acknowledged were funding terrorism.
The mainstream press have made no real attempt to inform the American people about the Saudi Arabian-founded “charity” called the Muslim World League, but its connection to terrorism is clear and documented.
A memo sent by Secretary of State Clinton on December 30, 2009 — originally published by WikiLeaks — makes it clear that the Secretary of State’s office believed Saudi Arabia was not taking action to stop terrorism outside its own borders and that the Muslim World League was being used to fund terrorism.
While admitting that “Saudi Arabia has enacted important reforms to “criminalize terrorist financing and restrict the overseas flow of funds from Saudi-based charities,” the memo points out that the Saudis have done nothing to stop groups like the Muslim World League from funding terrorism:
However, these restrictions fail to include multilateral organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY.) Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas.
Remember: Secretary Clinton issued this warning about the Muslim World League in 2009. At this time, when Huma Abedin was Clinton’s closest aide and had a security clearance, Abedin also had direct connections to the Muslim World League, including having multiple family members working for a Muslim World League affiliate.
However, none of this is Ellison’s concern. In his 2012 letter, the man the Democrats tout as the first Muslim elected to Congress attempts to dismiss the plain facts about Huma Abedin. His letter to Michele Bachmann says:
With regard to Ms. Abedin’s father, you point to a single passage from an article claiming that he founded “the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, an institution that had the quiet but active support of the then General Secretary of the Muslim World League, Dr. Umar Abdallah Nasif.” You then write, “As the Pew Forum notes, the Muslim World League has a longtime history of being closely aligned and partnering with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Put together, the primary source of evidence for your serious claims against Ms. Abedin is that her deceased father founded an institute that received unspecified “support” from a man who at one point led an organization that was aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ellison tries to make the connection between the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and the Muslim World League a conspiracy theory when it is a simple truth.
It is worthwhile to break down those two short paragraphs to demonstrate how many different techniques the Minnesota Congressman uses in his attempts to mislead the public. This deception begins with the first sentence:
With regard to Ms. Abedin’s father, you point to a single passage from an article claiming that he founded “the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, an institution that had the quiet but active support of the then General Secretary of the Muslim World League, Dr. Umar Abdallah Nasif.”
By saying Bachmann points to a “single passage from an article,” Ellison is trying to imply that somehow the link between the Abedin family and the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and its parent organization, the Saudi Arabia Muslim World League, is in doubt.
Ellison does not deny the facts because he cannot.
In reality, there is no question whatsoever that the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs was run from its start by the Abedin family, nor is there any doubt at all that the group was founded and exists today as part of the Saudi Arabian charity, the Muslim World League.
A rare, mostly factual story about Huma Abedin that Vanity Fair published earlier this year reports on the same indisputable facts that Congressman Ellison had successfully tried to muddy the waters on four years earlier:
When Abedin was two years old, the family moved to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where, with the backing of Abdullah Omar Nasseef, then the president of King Abdulaziz University, her father founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a think tank, and became the first editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which stated its mission as “shedding light” on minority Muslim communities around the world in the hope of “securing the legitimate rights of these communities.”
Although Ellison attempted to dismiss the connections in 2012 as the ravings of right-wing kooks, the facts were simple to ascertain even then.
A simple Internet search about the Journal for Muslim Minority Affairs brings up the publication’s website, which shows on the masthead that the entire Abedin family runs the journal, with Huma herself listed as an assistant editor for years — including time when she was working for Hillary Clinton.
In fact, had Ellison been making any attempt to honestly look at the facts about Huma Abedin, he or his staff would have had no problem simply going to the website of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and noting the group’s address at 46 Goodge Street in London, located inside the London office of the Muslim World League.
Ellison’s 2012 letter next points out something that is completely true as part of its overarching attempt to dismiss the truth. Ellison continues, quoting Bachman, “As the Pew Forum notes, the Muslim World League has a longtime history of being closely aligned and partnering with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Here is exactly what the Pew Research Center points out in a 2010 article from its report Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe: “Between the 1970s and 1990s, the European activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth became so intertwined that it was often difficult to tell them apart.”
Syed Abedin started the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs in this same period, the late 1970s.
Another important terrorism link between the Muslim World League and the Muslim Brotherhood came in the 1980s with the formation of the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or “The Services Center” that supported foreign mujahideen fighters coming to Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
The MAK was run by Osama bin Laden and is the acknowledged pre-cursor to al-Qaeda.
In 1984, mujahideen fighters were streaming in from throughout the world to the MAK office in Peshawar, Pakistan—in the shared office of the Muslim World League and the Muslim Brotherhood.
It can be difficult for the uninitiated to try and keep track of groups such as the Saudi Arabian Muslim World League and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Rep. Ellison takes advantage of the fact that most Americans know little to nothing about Middle Eastern political organizations.
Although Ellison led the charge attacking Bachmann and defending Abedin, he was joined by Republicans like Arizona Sen. John McCain and high-profile anti-Trump Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham said at the time that “[Bachmann] has no idea what they’re saying because they’ve never met [Huma.] She is about as far away from the Muslim Brotherhood view of women and ideology as you possibly could get.”
McCain’s support for Abedin is the primary defense for leftist organizations like the David Brock-founded Media Matters for America, citing his comments to smear anyone who attempts to question her.
Meanwhile, the Democrat’s media allies did their part, too, in covering up the story in 2012 and backing Ellison’s trickery.
In this video CAIR posted in 2012, titled “Anderson Cooper Slams Michele Bachmann’s Islamophobic Witch Hunt,” CNN’s Cooper essentially repeats Ellison’s talking points:
Recent vindication of the idea that Saudi Arabian officials have supported radical Islamic terrorism comes in the form of one top official stating that “we misled you” regarding their support for regional religious extremist groups this September.
If the job of the media is to educate the public on complex subjects and to get to the truth, they failed miserably in the case of Huma Abedin’s clear connections to Clinton-acknowledged terror funder, the Muslim World League.
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