The Most Undercovered News Story Of The Past Three Years – Huma Abedin

My number one source of internet traffic over the past four years is “Huma Abedin.”

I’ve had 42,000 visits to my website today, and 90% of them have come looking for info on Huma Abedin.

Who is she?

We know that Huma Abedin was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and then moved to the United States and went to work as an intern for Bill Clinton in 1996 and became Hillary Clinton’s body person after that, including during Hillary’s 2008 failed campaign to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. president.

Huma Abedin started dating Anthony Weiner in 2008. They married in 2010.

The MSM only gives Huma glowing news coverage, but who is she really?

Bloggers like me have assembled the info they can. We’ve published speculation such as — is she a Saudi spy? Is she gay? Gossip fills in the gaps when the official narrative is insufficient to answer the questions.

The New York Times published tonight this typical pablum:

Mr. Weiner and Ms. Abedin have seemed an unlikely couple from the start. They come from very different backgrounds — he is a Jewish man from Brooklyn, she a Michigan-born Muslim-American raised in Saudi Arabia by an Indian father and a Pakistani mother. And Mr. Weiner and Ms. Abedin have very different personalities.

He is a fiery, publicity-craving wisecracker with a reputation as a Romeo and a habit of turning up in the tabloids. He can be overbearing and intense and pushes his staff and himself unrelentingly.

She is calm, private and glamorous, with a sense of elegancethat has earned her attention from fashion magazines. Her close friend Oscar de La Renta designed her chiffon wedding gown, likening her to Scheherazade, the beautiful queen from “One Thousand and One Nights.”

But they complement each other well, said friends of the couple, who described Mr. Weiner as a sweet, supportive partner. Ms. Abedin, a practicing Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, does not drink, and Mr. Weiner has given up alcohol in solidarity with her, they said. He sometimes fasts with her during Ramadan, and often meets her at the airport when she returns from long trips, even in the early morning hours.

Friends say that Ms. Abedin had been courted by “a lot of very successful, important people,” but it was Mr. Weiner’s persistence and tenacity, as well as his confidence and sense of humor, that eventually won her over.

“I kept on hearing stories of how adoring he was of her and how much he cared about her, and over time it became clear that this was something he was focused on, and it was for real,” said a friend of Ms. Abedin, who asked to remain anonymous because he was commenting on a personal matter. Ms. Abedin got her start in politics in 1996 as an intern in Ms. Clinton’s White House office, and has been her aide since. She and Mr. Weiner met when Ms. Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, but did not start dating until Ms. Clinton ran for president 2008.

At their wedding, Mr. Weiner’s robust premarital dating life was the subject of considerable roasting, and Mr. Weiner made it clear Monday that Ms. Abedin knew about his rakish past, including his use of social media for sexual communication.

The MSM is so antiseptic about Anthony Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin that it makes you wonder what they’re hiding.

MyFOXNY.com reports:

Abedin was reportedly once courted by actor George Clooney and has been featured in Vogue .
Abedin wed Weiner, 46, last July at the Oheka Castle in Huntington, on Long Island in a ceremony conducted by former President Bill Clinton .
Weiner is Jewish, while Abedin, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, is Muslim.
The couple announced their engagement in 2009.  They had been dating since they met while Abedin was campaigning with Hillary for President in 2008.
Huma Abedin did not take his name when she became Weiner’s wife.
Abedin has kept a very low profile since it was revealed last week that a Washington state co-ed received a photo of an erect penis, covered by a pair of briefs, from Weiner’s Twitter account.

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NYT: ‘A Conservative Blogger Looks for Legitimacy’

This New York Times article is nonsense. Andrew Breitbart is not looking for legitimacy. He has legitimacy. He has millions of readers every day.

So why does the New York Times publish such nonsense? Because they have the delusion that they are the ones who grant legitimacy and therefore people need to cater to them.

All of my life I’ve had people saying to me, “Don’t you want to be taken seriously?”

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve known about the power of words and known I have a facility with words, and therefore I don’t have to worry about being taken seriously.

I remember a lot of talk in various industries I’ve covered about who would make me legitimate. Well, I made me legitimate.

I remember people telling me in 2007 that the Jewish Journal cover story on me gave me legitimacy. Heck, I got a lot more legitimacy from having tens of thousands of readers and having millions of people watching me on 60 Minutes and Entertainment Tonight and publishing a widely-reviewed book.

I’ve had more than 43,000 visits to my website today (thanks to the Anthony Weiner story), which is about 13 times my normal amount of 3,000 visits a day (a number that has held steady since the end of 2001).

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Is Huma Abedin Partly Responsible For Her Husband’s Sexting?

MSNBC’s Christ Matthew suggests that Huma Abedin is partially responsible for Anthony Weiner’s behavior.

In 2007, gossip linked Huma sexually to Hillary Clinton. Then in 2008, Huma settled down with Anthony Weiner.

In today’s news conference, Anthony Weiner said Huma knew about his past habits of sexting.

She was warned, just like the sotah.

Joe emails:

My guess is she turned off spigot soon after the marriage. She learned from the best, namely, Hillary Clinton.

Weiner is too full of himself to go the spitzer route for services for hire, and unable to score women for free because he is not tiger woods. This online stuff is truly puerile and, in my view, is more psychologically problematic than paying. I guess it is not “cheating” in the Bill Clinton sense, but it is truly bizarre. The idea of digitizing the sex act really is kind of a deep form of resentment against sexuality – that somehow one can use the right hand to type and the left hand to jerk off so as to fulfill the human need for contact. There is simply no way that typing vulgarity can even come close to fulfilling the need, and even trying shows a sort of childishness that borders on stupidity.

Wiener should have realized that he is in a marriage of convenience, which was his choice, and then logged on to free porn sites. It works for approximately 50% of married men, and the rest cheat.

Knowing that Anthony Weiner did these online flirtations, Huma chose to marry him. I find it hard to feel sorry for her. She chose to marry a scumbag. Anthony Weiner has acted like a scumbag many times publicly. A 2001 Vanity Fair article detailed his hijinks with interns.

Huma Abedin chose to be the bodywoman for Hillary Clinton, so she obviously does not have standards.

This scandal has legs because we still don’t know much about Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin and her strategic relationships. Is she an agent of Saudi intelligence? What are her sexual preferences? Was she keeping Weiner happy in that department? Did they make some deal before marriage that he could screw around? How many women has Weiner behaved beastly to? I’m sure there are many and those stories will only keep rolling out.

The New York Post reports:

She’s standing by her man — but that act seems to be wearing thin.
Rep. Anthony Weiner’s humiliated wife sheepishly showed her face at a Washington event yesterday, keeping a stiff upper lip amid the swirling scandal surrounding her husband’s tawdry Twitter photo.
Huma Abedin, 34, briefly hesitated at the State Department ballroom door before working up the courage to go in — but she left after just five minutes and steered clear of her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
While she put on a brave face inside the Beltway, her husband was busy weaseling out of a long-scheduled speaking engagement at last night’s Wisconsin Democratic Convention.

The New York Post reports June 3:

Huma Abedin — the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — isn’t fretting over the crotch shot sent to a comely co-ed from her husband’s lively Twitter account, a close friend said.
“She’s not worried about infidelity,” said her friend. “She’s confident and comfortable in her marriage.”

Is Anthony Weiner a beard for Huma Abedin?

When Bill Clinton sexually strayed, Dick Morris suggested that Hillary Clinton was perhaps not interested in sex with a man.

Time magazine reported: “Then Morris, who left Clinton’s employ in August 1996 when his tryst with a Washington prostitute went shockingly public, promptly inserted foot in mouth, hinting to KABC radio that Bill’s problems were rooted in Hillary “not necessarily being into regular sex with men.””

So if Hillary’s not interested in sex with men and Huma’s not interested in sex with men, what are their men going to do sexually?

From the NYDN Jan. 29, 1998:

Morris did not respond directly to McCurry’s broadside yesterday but released a statement in which he denied saying First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton “was gay.
“Hillary is, to my knowledge, not gay,” Morris said. “I have a very high regard for both Bill and Hillary Clinton and only wish them well in this extremely difficult time.”
But on Tuesday night, Morris accused the radio station of twisting his words by playing an edited tape “to convince people that I said the the opposite.”
KABC station spokeswoman Shelly Wagner denied the station monkeyed with the tape, adding, “the transcript speaks for itself.”
Morris was bantering with the radio jocks about the Clinton crisis when he launched into a theory about why the President might seek sex from a White House intern and why Hillary Clinton might forgive her hubby for doing so.
“None of what I’m about to say is necessarily a fact,” Morris cautioned. “Let’s assume that some of the allegations that Hillary sometimes not necessarily being into regular sex with men might be true.
“Let’s assume that this is a guy who’s been sexually active for a long time, and then got it that as President he’d have to not have to shut himself down. You would then expect a variety of things which would be quasi-sexual in nature.”
One of those things, Morris said, might be phone sex which Lewinsky claims to have engaged in with the President. “We’re talking about a kind of Walter Mitty life,” he said.

So here’s an excerpt from that 2001 Vanity Fair article about Anthony Weiner’s undignified behavior.

Scene: “Davis and her group of attractive women happen upon Rep. Weiner and a large group of Congressmen towards the end of the piece, after the September 11th attacks change mood of the nation’s capital. They hesitate to interact with the group of men cackling and feasting at the same establishment as them, but one of them dares engage:”

Vanity Fair article:

Even Diana looks uncertain about actually venturing into the “boys’ club” sanctuary. “Not a woman in there,” she remarks.
Then Caroline, the aspiring journalist, feisty and hungry to taste everything Washington has to offer before returning to Britain, settles it. Leaning back, she taps the balding guy on the arm as he returns from the men’s room. “What’s going on in there? Why are you all having so much fun?” she asks.
The man grins. “Those are a group of congressmen who are friends of mine. I thought they were hungry. They needed to kind of let themselves go.” He pauses. “And they are doing that.
“Come in and meet the rowdy crew,” he says. And with a toss of her hair, Caroline stands up and goes in.
The women are heckled as they enter. “Tell us your name and where you are from,” says one of the men. As if on a game show the women comply, one by one. When Caroline says she is an intern, the largest of the group, a white-haired man with a big belly and big laugh, roars, “We’re afraid of interns.” He throws his knife at a lean man named Mike, at the other end of the table. Mike is unamused. He threatens to throw it back. Another guy, rotund and jolly-faced, stands up and does an impression of Marlon Brando doing Don Corleone. The others think it’s hysterical.
Diana whispers that there is no way they can be congressmen. She figures they are businessmen. She wonders how she is going to get out.
They are congressmen—although at first they pretend not to be. One, the youngest, with a tiny goatee, introduces himself as Anthony, an auto-parts salesman. The others call him “the Jewish kid” and make fun of his beard. Their real names and states are as follows: the auto-parts salesman is Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.); the lean Mike is Michael Capuano (D-Mass.); the jolly guy who imitated Brando is John Larson (D-Conn.); the man who was worried about interns is Robert Brady (D-Pa.).

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Jeffrey Goldberg Joins Tablet

Danielle Berrin writes:

Last week, Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg announced his plan to move his eponymous blog, “Goldblog” to the online Jewish magazine, Tablet. This came as a surprise, since during an interview for aprofile I wrote of him last fall, he expressed considerable discomfort with the term “Jewish journalist.” He said it was “ghettoizing” and that he didn’t want to be “pigeonholed” and that blogging on Jewish issues from The Atlantic’s general interest platform suited him just fine (see below). “It’s the best of all possible worlds,” Goldberg said.
Well, something changed his mind (or maybe it was Mem Bernstein, the venture philanthropist that funds Nextbook Inc. and affiliates). Because what once seemed parochial and limiting to Goldberg is now being plugged in the most flattering terms: Tablet is “entertaining, stimulating, sophisticated and complicated,” he said in a PR statement posted on Tablet’s Website. But writing on his blog last Friday, he was more honest about his ambivalence: “I don’t make this move lightly,” he wrote.
“I think we’re entering a period of huge disruption in the relationship between America and Israel, and between American Jews and Israelis, and I want to be able to focus on these conflicts in an intensely granular way, inside the Jewish community. Tablet is the most exciting Jewish publication I’ve seen since I worked, in the previous century, at the Seth Lipsky-led Forward, and it is becoming the hub of the worldwide Jewish conversation.”
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Withdrawn! Santa Monica’s Ballot Measure To Ban Circumcision Is No More

The Jewish Journal reports:

The proponent of a proposition aimed at banning circumcision in Santa Monica has informed the Jewish Journal that she is abandoning her effort to put the question to voters in the beachfront city before beginning to collect any signatures.

Jena Troutman, a lactation consultant and self-described “children’s rights advocate,” said Monday afternoon that she has decided not to move forward with the petition because of what she called the media’s misrepresentation of her efforts as an attack on religious freedom.

“It shouldn’t have been about religion in the first place,” Troutman said in an interview. “Ninety-five percent of people aren’t doing it for religious reasons, and with everyone from the New York Times to Glenn Beck focusing on the religious issue, it’s closing Americans down to the conversation.”

Troutman was featured prominently in an article in the New York Times on Sunday about attempts to ban circumcision in two California cities. A mother of two, Troutman runs the website wholebabyrevolution.com, which she describes as an educational resource for parents considering circumcision.

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A Guide To Beards

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The Efforts To Ban Circumcision In California

The New York Times reports:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — When a group of activists proposed banning circumcision in San Francisco last fall, many people simply brushed them aside. Even in that liberal seaside city, it seemed implausible that thousands of people would support an effort to outlaw an ancient ritual that Jews and Muslims believe fulfills a commandment issued by God.

But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits. Now a similar effort is under way in Santa Monica to get such a measure on the ballot for November 2012.

If the anticircumcision activists (they prefer the term “intactivists”) have their way, cities across the country may be voting on whether to criminalize a practice that is common in many American hospitals. Activists say the measures would protect children from an unnecessary medical procedure, calling it “male genital mutilation.”

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “Perhaps the Jewish community will awaken to the fact that the left is its enemy, not its friend. The left is where the delegitimization of the one Jewish state on earth takes place.”

“All of the Jewish groups within Jewish life understand that efforts to ban circumcision have been animated by animosity towards Jews. There’s a comic book put out by the leader of this movement to ban circumcision that the ADL correctly labeled anti-Semitic. It has these caricatured rabbis as maniacal demonic figures trying to hurt babies.”

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Los Angeles’ first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month begins

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Outside City Hall, a string of balloons hovered in the muggy June air. They were red, yellow, green, purple and blue.

The rainbow theme was fitting: On Friday, Los Angeles officials launched the city’s first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month, which will include an art exhibit at City Hall and events in conjunction with the annual Gay Pride celebration next weekend.

For years, Los Angeles has honored other groups — African Americans, Latinos, Asian Pacific Islanders — with monthlong education campaigns.

Councilman Bill Rosendahl said the designation of June as LGBT Heritage Month is important because gay people, like other minorities, “have an identity that needs to be clearly appreciated.” In 2005, Rosendahl was the first openly gay candidate to run for and be elected to the City Council.

He was beaming Friday as he stood during the council meeting with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck and other officials, to honor several lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Angelenos.

For nearly two hours, Rosendahl and his colleagues talked about gay rights, gay representation on the council, AIDS and much more, occasionally sharing personal stories that drew laughter — and at times surprise — from an audience that included many LGBT rights activists.

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “By unbelievable coincidence, all of the Los Angeles months celebrating heritage are of Democratic communities. Africa-American. Latino. Asian Pacific-Islander month.”

“What do we celebrate in the transgender?”

“Why do we need a month to celebrate transgender and transsexual? Because it’s a vote.”

“Why don’t we celebrate Mormons? Cuban-Americans? I’m amazed they don’t have a Jewish heritage month.”

“Those who’ve experienced evil [such as communism] overwhelmingly vote Republican.”

“I don’t think we should have any of these heritage months. I don’t we should have anything that demands in our textbooks that x number of pages be given to women, to this group. All pages in all textbooks should be given over to only one question — what of significance happened?”

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Remembering Huma Abedin In Happier Times

Here’s my previous coverage of Huma Abedin.

Ken Silverstein writes for Harpers Nov. 7, 2007:

It’s not just Republicans who play rough in South Carolina. Rumors have been circulating in the Palmetto State, and elsewhere, that Hillary Clinton is having a lesbian affair. Her alleged paramour: a beautiful aide named Huma Abedin (Oscar de la Renta says he longs to see Huma in a strapless dress before he dies). As you can see from the photo, if Hillary is having an affair with Abedin it would not be evidence of her lesbianism as much as of her common sense and sound judgment.
The hard-to-credit rumor of Hillary’s Sapphic excursions is being stoked by right-wing bloggers. They suggest that this supposed romance shows the candidate is not only a lesbian but consorting with terrorists, given that the Michigan-born Abedin is reportedly from a family brimming with known Muslims.
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Dennis Prager On Anthony Weiner

On his radio show this morning before Anthony Weiner’s press conference, Dennis Prager said: “I don’t find scandals interesting as a rule because I just assume they happen. I find policy interesting.”

“I am convinced Anthony Weiner is lying to the public. I have thousands of followers on Twitter. I know exactly what you can do. You can individually respond to certain people but nobody can respond on my behalf. It would take massive work by some brilliant cyberperson to get into my account and send a private message to one of my followers. But if this happens, you get the police involved. Weiner does not want the police involved. That’s the giveaway.

“It’s so obvious that he sent a picture of himself in his underwear. He sent a photo of his penis in a certain state.”

“Aside from how childish this is, as an adult man to do this, as a man, I’m embarrassed. His lack of understanding of women.”

Cindy Meston, a clinical psychologist and author of the book 237 Reasons Why Women Have Sex, says that seeing a man’s penis is not one of them.

Why, I ask Meston, have people never really talked about this? Alfred Kinsey, the “father” of sexology, asked 7,985 people about their sexual histories in the 1940s and 50s; Masters and Johnson observed people having orgasms for most of the 60s. But they never asked why. Why?

“People just assumed the answer was obvious,” Meston says. “To feel good. Nobody has really talked about how women can use sex for all sorts of resources.” She rattles off a list and as she says it, I realise I knew it all along: “promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad.” Women, she says, “can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn’t stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous.”

“We never ever expected it to be so diverse,” she says. “From the altruistic to the borderline evil.” Evil? “Wanting to give someone a sexually transmitted infection,” she explains.

Dennis: “There’s disgusting and there’s stupidly disgusting.”

“It’s not an affair, but in some ways it’s uglier.”

“The Republican [congressman who resigned] sent a picture of himself without his shirt on. Big difference. And he just said OK. I have brought shame to the Congress. I am a Republican. I believe there is such a thing as a shame.

“I believe Republicans have a deeper sense that there is shame you bring on institutions.”

Mickey Kaus writes: “I thought Weiner did almost as well as he could possibly do. He had the requisite L.A. Confidential bare honesty. … But if he isn’t addicted to sex, he’s clearly addicted to air time. He couldn’t get off the podium until he’d said at least one obnoxious thing, which is that he had “not much desire” to actually meet the women he was tweeting with (and that he was now supposedly apologizing to). … We await apologies from Kos (“Breitbart’s #Twitterhoax“) and his colleagues. … P.S.: What we will probably get is the MSM playing catch up and, out of guilt for missing the story, beating up on Weiner beyond the call–much as it is beating up on John Edwards, having been given the news peg of his (misguided) indictment.”

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