Hugh Fitzgerald posts on JihadWatch:
Now that the rumors about Hillary and her aide have hit the Times of London, Hillary will feel she cannot abandon her protégé. She instead is likely to become indignant, more determined to be seen, defiantly, with Huma Abedin on every occasion and to attack those who express the slightest, perfectly justified reservations about the perfectly plausible notion that Mrs. Clinton gets her idea of Islam, or of what Islam might be, necessarily skewed, from someone apparently full of personal charm and good looks (never to be discounted, often dangerously employed). One need only see how the personal charm of all those Shi’as in exile, Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, Rend al-Rahim Francke, not to mention Paul Wolfowitz’s close friend, helped present a misleading view of Iraq. They sold to the Bush Administration an Iraq which would be eternally grateful to its American liberators, an Iraq that within months of the toppling of the old regime would be back on its feet, still celebrating in Baghdad its liberation, with that celebration "making the liberation of Kabul look like a funeral procession" — as Bernard Lewis is reported to have assured others in Washington.
Think of the personal charm, those liquid brown eyes, of that nice Pakistani lady who shows up at the local elementary school to teach the students "about Islam." She is armed with a prayer rug, and pretty postcards of mosques, including of course the Mosque of Omar, and her beautiful exotic dress, and those wonderful exotic foods she brings, the chicken with pita, and the honeyed pastries, which the children are all so looking forward to — mmm…it all smells so good — after her talk, about Ramadan, and Iftar dinners, and how little Muslim boys and girls obey their parents and pray and are deeply devout just like, exactly like, little Christian boys and girls, so what’s there to worry about? What indeed?
And think of the office with the Muslim colleague who is so friendly, so nice, who always inquires after your wife or husband or children, who seems so much warmer than your fellow, non-Muslim, harried thoroughly Western workers. What a relief to have such a nice guy in the office. Just as long, of course, as you carefully stay off the subject of Islam, or allow him to do all the talking about it, and never once dare to inject a note of doubt or wariness or criticism. For if you do, suddenly quite a different aspect of that same colleague, once so warm, so trustworthy, may be seen, perhaps just in a glimpse, when the deepest matters are touched.
Of course one is perfectly justified in worrying about this kind of influence. For if the reports are to be believed, Huma Abedin remains, despite living in the West, a "deeply conservative" Muslim. We are entitled to assume, therefore, that she still regards the Qur’an as the uncreated and immutable Word of God. And we are entitled to consult that "Word of God" to find out what she believes. And that includes 9.5, and 9.29, and another hundred deeply disturbing and hate-filled verses. We are entitled to assume that she is familiar with the most "authentic" Hadith in the most authoritative collections. We are entitled to assume that she regards Muhammad as exemplary, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, and that therefore she finds all of his behavior not only beyond criticism, but to be taken as a model: little Aisha, and the murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak, the decapitation of the 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, the attack on the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, and so on.
Is this close aide, this aide-de-camp, who may or may not be closer and more intimate with Hillary Clinton than anyone else on earth, really a deep admirer of that Muhammad? Is she a deep believer in the Qur’an, and therefore a supporter of the Shari’a, desirous naturally of removing all barriers to the spread of the faith of which she is not only an adherent by birth (born into it through no fault of her own), but apparently by conviction? She is, furthermore, the daughter of a Muslim preacher who went to Saudi Arabia, the place where the most rigorous and unmediated Islam is put into practice, and enforced at every level.
