Left Rushes To Defend Huma Abedin, (or At Least TO Attack Her Critics)

After watching the sophomoric behavior of several journalists during the Q&A following Andrew McCarthy’s presentation at the National Press Club on Wednesday, I’m not surprised that the media is trying to neutralize him today.  Andrew Bostom responds to one of the hits, by Dana Milbank on the Washington Post’s blog. Here’s an excerpt from Bostom:

Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McCarthy gave a riveting presentation at The National Press Club about Muslim Brotherhood influence peddling, and national security. (The full text of Andy's prepared remarks are available here; the video of the entire press conference can be viewed at C-SPAN 3 here)

Impenetrable by fact, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has written a predictably dishonest and uninformed attack on McCarthy's briefing. Consistent with his crude pun on McCarthy's name in the title, Milbank's vicious blog just sprays defamatory charges of conspiracism at McCarthy. While Milbank's essential sin is a crude, willful omission of the voluminous evidence McCarthy adduced, the Washington Post columnist also disingenuously (and /or out of distressingly lazy ignorance) misrepresents the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (and its journal) -- a defining enterprise of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's family .

Here is Milbank's reductio ad absurdum assessment, complete with his own sneer quotes:

Abedin's mother, brother and late father, all academics, were active in the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which McCarthy alleges was created by Abdullah Omar Naseef, "a major Muslim Brotherhood figure involved in the financing of al-Qaeda." To that, he adds the charge that "Abedin is directly connected" to Naseef because her mother, the editor of the institute's quarterly journal, listed her as an "assistant editor" between 1996 (when she was 20) and 2008. Abedin worked for the Clinton White House, Hillary Clinton's Senate office and the Clinton campaign during that time, so it's unlikely that she was doing much editing. It's also difficult to see how affiliation with the journal -- which publishes articles such as "The North African Heritage of the Hui Chinese" and "Muslim Mudejar Women in Thirteenth-Century Spain" -- gives Abedin conflicted loyalties.

Dana Milbank needs to read more than the table of contents when he evaluates a scholarly journal.

Please read the entire article at American Thinker:(“Educating Dana Milbank About the Abedin Family Journal”).

In his blog post Milbank also claims McCarthy “had difficulty when Mother Jones reporter Adam Serwer challenged him to explain how Obama was advancing sharia at the same time he was supporting same-sex marriage.”   McCarthy did have some difficulty with that “challenge,” as it was a total non sequitur bearing no relation to the subject-matter of McCarthy’s talk.   There isn’t always a logical response when one is confronted with an adolescent diversion.  McCarthy had no trouble at all explaining the decades-old (and well-documented) working relationship leftists and Islamists share based on their common enmity to American freedom.  

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