In the midst of the welter of charges and counter charges that may or may not sink the national nervous breakdown that is the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, it’s worth examining who exactly is Huma Abedin and how bizarre it is that such a person ever could be the closest confidante of the woman who would be our first female president.

It’s a tale in its own way resonant of the 1930s and ’40s, when communists sworn to the violent overthrow of the United States government rose to the highest echelons of our State Department and other agencies.

This is not to say that Huma Abedin is any Alger Hiss, but she is, if anything, far more intimately involved with the Muslim Brotherhood than Hiss ever was with the Communist Party. And she was—at least until now—potentially more powerful than Hiss.

Huma is literally the child of the Brotherhood. Both her deceased father and living mother (with whom she is in some reports currently ensconced) were intellectual leaders of the organization, if you can call it intellectual. Mostly, it’s pure bigotry. Andrew McCarthy sums it up:

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, 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 [sic] 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. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

None of this is news to those paying attention, nor should it be news that the Muslim Brotherhood is mother and father of al Qaeda and therefore ISIS. Nor, at this point, alas, is it astonishing that Obama and Hillary cozied up to Egypt’s Morsi, the Islamofascist candidate of that same Muslim Brotherhood, and other Middle Eastern characters similarly connected. (McCarthy, much more cognizant than I, has more at the link.)

What interests me as a onetime mystery writer is how this all happened, how it came to pass that Huma Abedin became the putative, self-described “daughter” of Hillary Clinton and married the ambitious Jewish congressman Anthony Weiner. The whole thing is incredible—a mashup of Joseph Heller and Leo Tolstoy, but no one could invent it.

On the surface, it would seem an obvious cover for Abedin and a fantastic opportunity for Weiner to align himself with the Clintons. But I don’t think it’s quite that. These people are crazier than they know and the Clintons more greedy than almost anyone will admit (Democrats, anyway).

Most of all, the whole thing is terminally weird. Hillary seems to be a truly inept person–despite her Yale Law degree—who always needed people sweeping up behind her (Huma, Podesta, etc.).

Bill isn’t particularly bright either, but extremely charming. He owes everything to Newt Gingrich, although I’m certain Bubba would never admit it. It was Newt who edged him into economic sanity. If Bill hadn’t listened to Gingrich, he would have been reviled by history for the Monica business. Now people say at least there was a good economy.

Kimberley Strassel calls the Clintons “grifters,” which of course they are. But what are Huma and Anthony? Also-ran grifters, I think.

Huma, despite all, was trying to escape from the Brotherhood a little bit. Think about it: what a horrible thing to grow up in. Sexist, homophobic, Neanderthal in essence. Hillary and, in another way, Anthony were an escape hatch. The problem for Huma was Hillary’s total corruption (a supposed feminist—she could embrace the Brotherhood? Think about that one too!) and Weiner’s pathetic compulsions.

My guess is Weiner’s perversions were to some extent a cry for help. He wanted to be caught. At some point, he desperately wanted out of the Clinton nexus (who wouldn’t?).

In the end there was no way out for poor Huma either. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to have sympathy for any of them. They have made us all victims. They are despicable.

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