Michelle Bachmann's Muslim witch hunt hits high gear

Rep. Michelle Bachmann is at it again. She and four other congressmen have made unsubstantiated accusations of Muslim Brotherhood affiliations against American government officials and agencies – conveniently all Democrats, and overwhelmingly Muslim. Her charges have been dismissed out of hand by a number of public figures and media mavens as the ravings and delusions of an over-heated right-wing feeding frenzy.

This is not Bachmann's first Muslim hunting trip. In previous letters, Bachmann singled out Huma Abedin, wife of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, and she is a special assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But Weiner's political demise (although self-inflicted) was not enough for Bachmann. She went after his Muslim wife as well. Bachmann now questions her loyalty to the U.S., citing three Abedin family members who are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Abedin has been targeted before by anti-Muslim activists, and as Bachmann notes in her poison pen letters, Abedin’s job at State “affords her routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.” Horrors!

Bachmann also writes that the State Department has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

Rep. Bachmann and her co-signers --Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland – have sent fresh letters to federal law enforcement agencies outlining their claims. The disingenuousness of the Bachmann Five's anti-Muslim campaign is, ironically, demonstrated by the very existence of these letters. These particular members of Congress chair or sit on important congressional committees, and therefore have considerable influence on U.S. intelligence matters. They can, on their own, investigate people they suspect of being security threats. But they choose instead to write and publish "open' letters and issue press releases to "alert" their respective "conservative," right wing constituencies that their tax dollars are hard at work rooting out evil Muslims and other "others" from amongst us. They use the term, "Muslim Brotherhood," in order to imply that a worldwide network of Muslim terrorists has infiltrated the U.S. government.

The Muslim Brotherhood is actually a loosely connected organization of religious-oriented men who operate differently from each other depending upon the particular country or nation involved. True, some adhere to sharia law in their own countries, and are hard-line in terms of minority and women's rights. But most, however, have renounced violence as a political tool long ago, and many compete for political power democratically.

As is being demonstrated in Egypt, Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood factions can and do successfully, democratically, come to power. Accusations by Bachmann and her cohorts of an undercover cell of the nefarious and dark Muslim Brotherhood burrowing into the bowels of the U.S. Government defames all American Muslims, not to mention the 1.2 billion who reside outside the U.S. “homeland.”

So to what may we ascribe Rep. Bachmann's actions this time? It's the same as last time: To discredit and make the Obama Administration "look bad," and most especially, Obama himself. Bachmann strikes me as a “true believer.” A true believer that Obama is everything, and more, that the hard right Republicans say he is: She believes that he is, in fact, a Muslim (as though being a Muslim is some sort of communicable disease). She believes that he was born in either Kenya, Indonesia – or Hawaii (many of her followers don't believe that Hawaii is part of the real America). She believes that he is a socialist-communist-collectivist-communalist; that he is fundamentally “un-American” (read black).

And so it is only natural that he would have Muslim and Muslim sympathizers wedged deeply in his Administration.

The point, then, is to get him and his Muslim friends out this November – at all costs.

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RESOURCES:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-trister/michele-bachmann-huma-abedin_b_1690604.html

http://leanforward.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/19/12842017-bachmanns-former-campaign-manager-joins-chorus-condemning-her-anti-muslim-remarks?lite

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/20/michele-bachmann-s-attacks-on-women-from-huma-abedin-to-nancy-pelosi.html

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/susan-milligan/2012/07/19/michele-bachmanns-vicious-smear-campaign