Armageddon (7 page)

Hillary's closest aide and current vice chairwoman of her 2016 campaign is Huma Abedin, who has strong connections to the
Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin, who
Vanity Fair
called “Hillary's Second Daughter,”
33
was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Pakistani and Indian immigrants and moved with her family to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she spent her entire childhood until she entered George Washington University in the United States.

Huma and Hillary are joined at the hip. They began their relationship in 1996 while Huma was serving as a White House intern assigned to Hillary. In Mrs. Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign and during her subsequent tenure, Huma was Hillary's traveling chief of staff and body aide. But apart from Hillary, Huma Abedin and her family have a long history of involvement with Palestinian causes. In 1998, Huma served as assistant editor of the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs
. Five Republican congressmen charged that Huma's late father, and her mother and brother are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Her mother, Saleha, “is a sociologist known for her strong advocacy of Sharia Law,” according to
FrontPage Magazine
, and a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, the Brotherhood's sibling. Saleha is also a board member of the International Islamic Council for Da'wah and Relief. This pro-Hamas entity is part of the Union of Good, which the US government has formally designated as an “international terrorist organization.”
34
FrontPage Magazine
notes that “from 1996–2008, Huma worked at the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs as the assistant editor of its in-house publication, the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs
(JMMA).” For seven years of her tenure, she worked with “al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Omar Naseef” at the JMMA.
35

Trump has excoriated Huma, focusing particularly on her marriage to former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner who was involved in a sexting scandal. The candidate said “so now, think of it, Huma is getting classified secrets. She is married to Anthony Weiner, who is a perv. Now these are confidential documents and guess what happens to Anthony Weiner. A month ago he went to work for a public relations firm.”
36

Huma's presence has been quite influential in Hillary's and Obama's treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization labeled as terrorist by most Middle Eastern countries. The Brotherhood is considered a terrorist organization by the governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Brotherhood's stated goal is to instill the Qur'an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state.” Its mottos include, “Believers are but Brothers,” “Islam is the Solution,” and “Allah is our objective; the Qur'an is the Constitution; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”
37

The
National Review
lists the ways since Hillary Clinton's tenure at the State Department began that “the United States has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood. . . . Our government

• • reversed the policy against formal contacts with the Brotherhood;
  
• • funded Hamas;
  
• • continued funding Egypt even after the Brotherhood won the elections;
  
• • dropped an investigation of Brotherhood organizations in the United States that were previously identified as co-conspirators in the case of the Holy Land Foundation financing Hamas;
  
• • hosted Brotherhood delegations in the United States;
  
• • issued a visa to a member of the Islamic Group (a designated terrorist organization) and hosted him in Washington because he is part of the Brotherhood's parliamentary coalition in Egypt;
  
• • announced that Israel should go back to its indefensible 1967 borders;
  
• • excluded Israel, the world's leading target of terrorism, from a counterterrorism forum in which the State Department
  sought to ‘partner' with Islamist governments that do not regard attacks on Israel as terrorism; and
  
• • pressured Egypt's pro-American military government to surrender power to the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood parliament and president just elected by Egypt's predominantly anti-American population.”
  38
  

While Hillary was pushing Israel to stop building settlements on the West Bank and bought into Obama's line that their failure to do so was torpedoing the peace process, she worked hard to help the Muslim Brotherhood take over in neighboring Egypt.

In Egypt, the so-called Arab Spring erupted early in 2012, fanned by pro-democracy protests in Tunisia. Demonstrators took to the streets of Cairo demanding the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose vicious but pro-Western regime had evoked howls of protest, forcibly put down for years.

The West was thrilled. Some alarmists worried that if Mubarak fell, the pro-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood might take over. But the Obama administration dismissed their concern and welcomed the end of Mubarak. As this former US ally struggled for traction in the streets, Hillary urged “a peaceful, orderly transition to a democratic regime” and called on Mubarak to respond to “the legitimate needs and grievances expressed by the Egyptian people and chart a new path.”
39

After Mubarak fell, the hopes and dreams of the Egyptian people for democracy were again crushed as the Muslim Brotherhood and its leader, Islamist Mohamed Morsi, took power. Domestically, Morsi cracked down on the secular elements who had tried to oust Mubarak and moved to restore Sharia Law. He was particularly vicious in his persecution of Egypt's Coptic Christians, the minority that comprises between a tenth and a quarter of Egypt's population.

Shortly after Morsi took office, a wave of violence gripped the Coptic community and their leader accused Morsi's government of “delinquency” and “misjudgments” for failing to prevent sectarian
street-fighting. He noted that “this is the first time the main Coptic Orthodox Cathedral has been attacked in Egypt's history.”
40
In foreign affairs, Morsi steered a course of cooperation with the Palestinian terrorists and appeared to all but junk the 1979 Camp David accords that brought peace to the Egyptian-Israeli relationship.

But Hillary was Morsi's biggest fan. On July 14, 2013, as millions of anti-Islamists demonstrated in Cairo against his regime, Hillary flew to see the embattled leader and lend him support. But the Egyptian Army, long a key force in their politics, wanted Morsi to go. As the threat of military intervention to unseat Morsi hovered over his presidency, Hillary declared that the United States “supports the full transition to civilian rule with all that entails.” She demanded “the military's return to a purely national security role.”
41

Breitbart News
reported that “the meeting itself sent a historic message. Seated in an ornate room in the presidential palace, Mrs. Clinton smiled for cameras and traded pleasantries with President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist jailed more than once by the American-backed autocracy overthrown 18 months ago. She became the highest ranking United States official to meet Mr. Morsi since he was sworn in.”
42

Hillary's visit cemented what Morsi's wife called a “special relationship” between her husband and the secretary of state.
43
Of Mrs. Clinton, she said, “We have a long friendship of many years. We lived in the U.S. and my children learned there. This friendship increased further when my husband became the legitimate president of the country.”
44

Hillary's backing for Morsi was very significant. The United States gives Egypt almost $3 billion of foreign aid each year, the bulk of it aimed at subsidizing the country's military—a payoff given for their entry into the Camp David Accords which guaranteed peace between Egypt and Israel.

Huma Abedin was not the only hook the Muslim Brotherhood had into the secretary of state. She had another Islamic radical in her midst. As noted, Gehad el-Haddad, the son of Morsi's foreign affairs advisor, served as the Muslim Brotherhood's top English
language communications official in Egypt. At the same time, he was employed by the Clinton Foundation, heading the Cairo office of the Clinton Climate Initiative. In April 2015, el-Haddad was sentenced to life in prison in Egypt for his work with the Muslim Brotherhood. With her top aide, Huma Abedin, an open sympathizer with the Muslim Brotherhood, and el-Haddad working for her foundation as he advised Egyptian president Morsi, we are right to ask Hillary, Which side are you on?

It can be dizzying to watch the fast changing policy positions of Hillary Clinton. With no real convictions other than ambition, she changes her views with the rapidity and totality of a kaleidoscope. The only thing her shifting views have in common is that they are driven by her political needs at that moment. It is a wonder that anyone listens to her anymore. Her political views have a half-life of a few months . . . or until the wind changes. Here is just a sampling of some of the recent flip-flops. Just a sampling.

As she began her solo political career in 2000, she announced in White Plains, New York that she opposed gay marriage: “Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.”
45
Indeed, Hillary supported her husband's decision to sign the now infamous (to the Left) Defense of Marriage Act, designed to make sure states without gay marriage did not have to give “full faith and credit” to gay marriages in other states.

In the 2008 campaign for president, she moved somewhat to the left as she turned to face a primary challenge from Barack Obama. At that time, during a debate sponsored by a gay-oriented television station, she was asked, “What is at the heart of your opposition to
same-sex marriage?”
46
She bobbed and weaved, but let her opposition stand saying, “Well, I prefer to think of it as being very positive about civil unions. You know, it's a personal position. How we get to full equality is the debate we're having, and I am absolutely in favor of civil unions with full equality of benefits, rights, and privileges.”
47

By 2016, facing an all-out challenge from Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders, she abandoned all reservations in a full-throated defense of gay marriage, saying, “LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones. And they are full and equal citizens, and they deserve the rights of citizenship. That includes marriage. That's why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples. I support it personally and as a matter of policy and law, embedded in a broader effort to advance equality and opportunity for LGBT Americans and all Americans.”
48

The signature foreign policy achievement of the Clinton administration was the ratification, in 1993, of NAFTA, providing for free trade among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In her memoir,
Living History
, published in 2003, Hillary strongly supported NAFTA: “Creating a free trade zone in North America—the largest free trade zone in the world—would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our economy was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization. Although unpopular with labor unions, expanding trade opportunities was an important administration goal.”
49

But when the Bush administration extended NAFTA to Central America in CAFTA in 2006, she voted against it. As public attitudes toward NAFTA soured (See our
Chapter Four
on how badly we have done under NAFTA), she began to criticize the accord and called for a moratorium on trade deals: At a debate hosted by CNN in November 2007, Clinton said, “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would, and that's why I call for a trade timeout.”
50

But the mother of all trade flip-flops came in 2015, when Hillary Clinton opposed ratification of a trade deal
she
helped to negotiate and had strongly endorsed—the TPP. This trade deal, discussed later in this book, links the United States with Chile, Peru, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. Not only does it eliminate tariffs, but it also limits our flexibility to adopt food and other regulations in our own country.

Hillary loved TPP before she started to run for president. In 2012, she praised it to the skies during a visit to Australia: “So it's fair to say that our economies are entwined, and we need to keep upping our game both bilaterally and with partners across the region through agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Australia is a critical partner. This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”
51

As secretary of state, Hillary positively gushed about the benefits of the TPP, calling it “exciting,” “innovative,” “ambitious,” “groundbreaking,” “cutting-edge,” “high-quality,” and “high-standard.”
52
Her support for TPP was fanned by her top advisors who held top positions with banks such as Morgan Stanley and other institutions deeply interested in selling the deal for their own profit.

Morgan Stanley spent $4 million in 2013 and $4.8 million in 2014 lobbying for TPP. Morgan's former employees seeded the top ranks of Hillary's State Department staff. Thomas Nides, Morgan's chief operating and administrative officer, joined Hillary's State Department as deputy secretary of state for management, a post from which he could advocate TPP at key junctures. When he left State, he was rewarded for his service by returning to Morgan as the bank's vice president.
53