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 Human 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.

Over the past 33 years, Huma Abedin's family has been responsible for the editorial production of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA)'s academic journal, known as Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Journal, from 1979-1995, and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs [JMMA], from 1996. till now, starting with family patriarch Syed Z. Abedin's, and Huma's mother, Saleha Abedin's, founding involvement since 1979, and subsequently joined by Huma's brother Hassan Abedin (1996 to present), Huma herself (1996 to 2008), and Huma's sister, Heba (married name Khalid, or Khaled; 2002 to present).

Syed Abedin, in the inaugural edition of the IMMA journal, gives an effusive tribute to one of his IMMA co-founders, Dr. Abdullah Omar Nasseef, Chairman of the IMMA. During his concurrent tenure as Secretary-General of the Muslim World League -- a combined Saudi Wahhabi, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated organization -- in July, 1988, Naseef also created the Rabita Trust, and became its chairman. On October 12, 2001, then President George W. Bush's Executive Order named Rabita Trust as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity, and the US Treasury Department froze its assets, while Naseef was still serving as the Trust's chairman. Nasseef remained on the IMMA journal Editorial Board through 2003, overlapping Huma Abedin's tenure for 7-years (i.e., 1996-2003).

The current (April/May 2012) issue of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs journal (JMMA) features two essays, introduced with lavish praise by Editor Saleha Abedin, which champion, unabashedly:

• The global hegemonic aspirations of major 20^th century Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, such as the eminent Muslim Brotherhood theoretician, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), and Abul Hasan Nadwi (d. 1999)

• The more expansive application of Sharia within Muslim minority communities residing in the West, with the goal of replacing these non-Muslim governing systems, as advocated by contemporary Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Taha Jabir al-Alwani

One of these JMMA essays repeats, approvingly, Qutb's pejorative characterization of the West as a "disastrous combination of avid materialism, and egoistic individualism." Abul Hasan Nadwi, was a founding member of the Muslim World League, a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference (now Cooperation), a member of the World Supreme Council of Mosques, and a member of the Fiqh Council of Rabita.  In a triumphal 1951 manifesto extolling Islamic supremacism, Nadwi had proclaimed  "Behold the world of man looking with rapture at the world of Islam as its savior, and behold the world of Islam fixing its gaze on the Arab world as its secular and spiritual leader. Will the world of Islam realize the hope of the world of men? And will the Arab world realize the hope of the Muslim world?" Citing Nadwi with admiration, the same JMMA article opines, "[T]he confrontation has taken the shape of an 'Islamic project' in the Muslim world against Western modernity.... The war that has been declared against Western modernity now seeks a new modernity...unlike Western modernity."

Another featured essay from the current issue of the JMMA is a fitting complement to  the journal's endorsement of the global Islamic supremacist agenda. This essay endorses the so-called "innovative" application of the  "Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities," living, for example, in the West, whose stated purpose is, "enforcement of shari'ah on the Muslim communities." However, by the essay's own expressed standard: "The theory of the Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities is most easily clarified by shedding light on its founders."

The two founders of this legal doctrine, as the essay  notes, are Yusuf al-Qaradawi of Qatar, and Taha Jabir al-Alwani of Virginia, USA.

Qaradawi has publicly advocated:

• The re-creation of a formal transnational United Islamic State (Islamic Caliphate)
• The jihad conquests of Europe, and the Americas
• Universal application of the Sharia, including Islamic blasphemy law, and the hadd punishments (for example, notably, executing so-called "apostates" from Islam)

Al-Alwani, writing as president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a think tank created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, stated, regarding a (then) new English translation of the classic Shafiite manual of Islamic jurisprudence Reliance of the Traveller,  "from a purely academic point of view, this translation is superior to anything produced by orientalists in the way of translations of major Islamic works." Notwithstanding al-Alwani's glowing tribute,  Reliance of the Traveller sanctions open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic Caliphate; rejection of bedrock Western liberties-including freedom of conscience and speech-enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel (who must be segregated and undergo female genital mutilation); and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption. Moreover,

• Al-Alwani wished Islamized Spain had conquered America and spread Islam in our hemisphere, not Christianity. He stated,  "Perhaps some of them [Muslims from Spain] would have been the ones who discovered America, not someone else, and America could have possibly been today among the lands of the Muslims"
• Al-Alwani was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Sami Al-Arian who pled guilty to conspiracy to aid the terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
• al-Alwani published an essay online, discovered (and translated from Arabic to English) in July 2011, entitled "The Great Haughtiness", which promoted conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred replete with Koranic references, conjoined to modern "Zionist conspiracies"

The Abedin family "academic" journal is a thinly veiled mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood's Sharia-supremacist agenda.  One can now add this conclusive, public record evidence to a host of other bona fide justifications for the Congressional inquiry demanded by Representative Bachmann, and her four intrepid colleagues. Evidence apologists for this odious and threatening ideology such as Dana Milbank would prefer to ignore.