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Huma Abedin, a U.S.-born Muslim of Indian and Pakistani parentage, has served for more than a decade as a top aide to Hillary Clinton, though for much of that time was relatively unknown to the American public. All that changed beginning in 2011 when her husband, Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-New York), was forced to resign from the U.S. House of Representatives due to a sexting scandal, and in 2016 when she was thrust into the limelight by an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server while at the State Department. As Clinton was running for president at the time, Abedin became the target of partisan attacks aimed at weakening her employer's candidacy. On 24 October 2016, an eight-and-a-half-minute video was uploaded to the highly-trafficked YouTube channel Anonymous purporting to prove that Huma Abedin, estranged wife of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and longtime aide to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, has undeniable ties to terrorists and 9/11 funders. It accrued more than 2 million views in under a week, resulting in a flash-flood of queries about it to our inbox. Neither the video nor its content was new, however, nor were they created by the hacktivist group Anonymous. The video was originally posted on 11 September 2016 to a YouTube channel called Leaked Uploads. It, in turn, closely follows the text of an article posted approximately 10 days before that in a subreddit populated by Donald Trump supporters. Both the text and video appear to have been created by the same individual, a user who goes by the handle Invadepro. Here is an excerpt from the text: As we mentioned above, none of these allegations are new. We'll review the main charges, beginning with Abedin's biographical information, in a moment, but it's worth pointing out at the outset that before she could serve as Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department, Abedin underwent a security clearance requiring, among other things, vetting of her personal and professional history to establish her loyalty to the United States and freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion. While we would not argue that the clearance process is infallible, nor that information could not subsequently come to light that might change the assessment, we think it likely that the investigators charged with the task have better research tools available to them than does the average Internet user. It's true that Huma Abedin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1976 to Muslim parents, Syed Zainul Abedin (born in India) and Saleha Mahmood Abedin (born in what is now Pakistan). In 1978, the family moved to Saudi Arabia, where her parents pursued academic careers and Huma Abedin spent most of her childhood and teenage years. She returned to the United States to study journalism at George Washington University in 1994. In 1996 she was hired as a White House intern assigned to First Lady Hillary Clinton, for whom she has worked off and on ever since. She became Clinton's top aide during the latter's Senate campaign in 2000, served as deputy chief of staff when Clinton was Secretary of State from 2009 through 2013, and as vice chairwoman of Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It's also true that from 1996 through 2008, Abedin was listed as an assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic journal founded by her father and taken over by her mother after Syed Abedin's death in 1993. The claim that the journal is owned by the Muslim World League, an organization alleged to promote an extreme form of Islam known as Wahhabism, is false, however. The journal is owned by the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a scholarly organization also founded by Huma Abedin's father whose mission is studying Muslims in non-Muslim countries. Any implication that the peer-reviewed journal, written by and for academics, is somehow radical is a misrepresentation, according to sources interviewed for a 25 August 2016 article in The Washington Post: In point of fact, Huma Abedin never literally worked at the Journal of Muslim Affairs at all, according to a spokesperson for the Clinton campaign, who said she was just a figurehead and not actually on staff. The video attempts to link the Abedin family to terrorism via their connection with Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Saudi Arabian professor who was also secretary-general of the Muslim World League between 1982 and 1992. Naseef, who worked (and still works) at the same university where Syed Abedin taught, helped launch the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, and for a time sat on the advisory board of the journal. The video provides no evidence that Abdullah Omar Naseef funded al-Qaeda or any other terror groups, however. It simply asserts that he did based on his authorization of a refugee relief fund in 1988 that later developed ties with al-Qaeda. The Washington Post explains: Another dubious connection cited in the video is Huma Abedin's membership in the Muslim Student Association while she attended George Washington University. As it happens, two years after Abedin graduated and left the university, a young man named Anwar al-Awlaki arrived, joined that same Muslim Student Association, and served as a school chaplain. Al-Awlaki, you may recall, was later identified as an al-Qaeda recruiter and killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. But the fact that each of them belonged, at different times, to the same campus religious organization does not mean they have anything in common other than being Muslim. The video also links the national Muslim Student Association to the Muslim Brotherhood, but apart from the fact that the latter helped establish the former more than 50 years ago, the claim that the two organizations are actively affiliated isn't supported by evidence. Most of these allegations first surfaced in 2012, when Michele Bachmann and other conservative Republicans launched a campaign denouncing Muslim extremists — Huma Adebin among them — who had supposedly infiltrated the U.S. government. The backlash against these unfounded charges transcended partisanship. Among those who condemned Bachmann's characterization of Abedin was then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, whom Politico quoted as saying: USA Today quoted then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, also a Republican, speaking in Abedin's defense as follows: And GOP Senator from Arizona (and former presidential candidate) John McCain summed up the consensus among members of both the House and Senate:
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