STEVE MARCUS
REUTERS
Democratic presidential candidate US Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) waves to the crowd with her personal assistant Huma Abedin (R) at her side after the MSNBC/Nevada Democratic Party Presidential Candidate’s debate in Las Vegas, in this January 15, 2008, file photo. The top Republican in the U.S. Congress criticized Rep. Michele Bachmann and four other fellow House Republicans for making “pretty dangerous” accusations when they questioned the security clearance of a Muslim aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin.
Michele Bachmann’s has stirred up a storm. Bachmann has been criticized on the floor of the Senate and denounced in the media, and inspired a petition calling for her resignation or removal from the House Intelligence Committee. Facts have never been her strong suit, but this time Bachmann stepped into a hornet’s nest. What is different about this firestorm and its outcome and why is it significant?
Bachmann and four other House Republicans wrote a letter asking the Department of Defense, the State Department, and other departments to investigate whether the U.S. government is being infiltrated by Muslim extremists. In particular they said that Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “has three family members—her late father, her mother, and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations. Her position provides her with routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.”
View Photo Gallery: Abedin, 35, is a longtime top aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton. She usually stays out of the limelight, in contrast to her headline-grabbing husband, who has been an outspoken Democrat on Capitol Hill.
As could be expected, Bachmann’s statements went viral on right wing (political and religious) and anti-Islam Web sites. However, in contrast to many instances in which Muslim Americans have been slandered by presidential candidates, members of Congress, hardline Christian Zionists and media, she has been accused of a witch hunt, reminiscent of the McCarthy era. In a rare show of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats and critics in the media, from CNN, MSNBC and Fox, were quick to characterize Bachmann’s insinuations as based on rumors and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
Prominent Republican leaders including war hero and former presidential candidateSen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) and several of Bachmann’s colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee denounced her actions. McCain’s delivered a blistering criticism on the floor of the Senate:
Boehner commented: “I don’t know Huma, but from everything that I do know of her she has a sterling character. Accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.”
REUTERS
Former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann announces the end of her presidential campaign in West Des Moines, Iowa in this January 4, 2012, file photo.
Perhaps most surprising and damaging was Ed Rollins, Bachmann’s former campaign chairman. In an op-ed posted on the Fox News Web site, Rollins wrote:
Bachmann’s is both a voice and victim of a growing xenophobic and Islamophobic sub-culture that indiscriminately blurs the distinction between the religion of Islam and the majority of mainstream Muslims with the actions and threats of a dangerous and deadly minority of terrorists. Bachmann has offered no hard evidence; her allegations are based on erroneous and unsubstantiated information primarily from notorious Islamophobes such as Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and a neoconservative with an obsession for conspiracy theories about Islam and Muslim “infiltration” in government. Gaffney has a track record of outrageous, and yes, flat-out wrong charges. On March 12, 2009, using “circumstantial evidence” which he admits was “not proven by any means,” he charged that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing. No such evidence has ever been shown to exist.
In 2010, Gaffney with former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, who has been celebrated by The American Conservative as “God’s Warrior,” published “Shariah: The Threat to America.” The report warns of a “stealth jihad” that must be “thwarted before it’s too late,” and contends that “most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists [and] the Muslims who practice Sharia law seek to impose it in this country,” the Washinton Post reported in 2010. According to The Washington Post, “Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center’s book inaccurate and counterproductive.”
Bachmann and like-minded neo-McCarthyites look to this book and Gaffney’s 10-part educational “course,” The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within, offered by the Center for Security Policy.
As a substitute for evidence, Gaffney uses name calling and anti-Muslim rhetoric to discredit even prominent non-Muslim conservative Republicans and organizations that have distanced themselves from his xenophobic hysteria. He has even charged that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is “under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law.”
Grover Norquist, a prominent Republican strategist, who like others, has been attacked by Gaffney for alleged ties to radical Islamist groups during President George W. Bush’s administration, dismissing Gaffney as a “sick, little bigot.”
View Photo Gallery: “Holmes and Cruise aren’t so different from the rest of us when it comes to interfaith marriage and divorce,” writes On Faith columnist Lisa Miller.
So what can we learn from the Bachmann’s witch hunt and why it backfired this time? The first lesson is that in America today a culture of ignorance and anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry can target Muslims and non-Muslims alike, whatever their credentials, however visible or invisible they are, from Huma Abedin to President Obama. Fortunately this time the target was an American Muslim, born in a distinguished family and and educated in America, respected in Washington circles due to her long working relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And who are Huma Abedin’s family members accused by Bachman and others?
Hassan Abedin, Huma’s brother, earned his PhD at the University of London and was a fellow at Oxford University’s Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, which received a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth. He is associate editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., speaks to members of her staff on board her campaign charter plane shortly before take-off from Washington’s Reagan National Airport, Friday, March 28, 2008. At left is aide Huma Abedin.
Both of Huma’s parents earned doctorates at the University of Pennsylvania and both taught in the United States. Huma’s mother, Dr. Saleha Abedin, is currently academic vice dean at Dar al-Hekma College, the first private women’s university established in Saudi Arabia. The college now has academic affiliations with major American universities and foundations, including Harvard and Columbia University as well as University of California, Berkeley, Wellesley College, Babson College and many others. She was part of the team that designed the college with its American liberal arts curriculum, training young women for career opportunities, financial independence and social mobility. Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy of the Bush administration, and more recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have spoken at Dar al-Hekma College.
Huma’s father, Dr. Syed Abedin was the founder of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which focuses on the challenges for minority Muslims living in non-Muslim societies and for non-Muslims living in Muslim societies.
Dr. Syed Abedin also was active internationally in addressing issues of religion and violence and in interfaith dialogue. His philosophy of life and religious outlook is summed up in a published piece written while the war in Bosnian was raging and the peace process was stalling, a year before he died on June 5, 1993:
Islamophobia has gone mainstream in communities from New York to California. Preachers of hate (politicians, preachers and pundits) and biased Internet sites have exploited legitimate concerns about domestic security with fear-mongering, conflating the religion of Islam with terrorism.
In the 2008 presidential elections, 2010 Congressional elections and recent Republican presidential candidates’ debate, Muslims have been used as convenient scapegoats, their mosques called monuments to terrorism, their laws, sharia and political parties in other countries such as the Muslim Brotherhood are said to want to take over America. Despite major polls showing American Muslims to be economically, educationally and politically integrated, powerful forces work hard to deny them their place as part of America’s social tapestry.
Despite all the paranoia, what objectively do we know about Muslim Americans? What does empirical evidence tell us? In contrast to the charges that Muslims cannot integrate and cannot be loyal citizens, major polls by the Pew Research Center and Gallup among others have found that the overwhelming number of Muslims are decidedly American in income, education and attitudes, rejecting extremism by large margins.
The “Bachmann Affair” is a wake-up call. Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, will not go away anytime soon, but it is also a shining example of the way forward: an insistence on American principles and values and the rule of law rather that innuendo.
John L. Esposito is founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin TalalCenter for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.