“Do not use political terms such as democracy/elections/freedom,” Saleha Abedin advised daughter Huma Abedin, in reference to a planned speech that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was going to deliver in 2010 at Dar Al Hekema, a women’s university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Huma Abedin was a top aide to Clinton at the time, while her mother is an Islamist activist who teaches at Dar Al Hekema.
Clinton wound up not using any of the terms that Saleha Abedin suggested be deleted from the speech.
The incident is among the revelations from the latest Hillary Clinton e-mails obtained by Judicial Watch late last week. Judicial Watch was forced to sue the State Department for the e-mails of Clinton and her aides, including Huma Abedin. The State Department had argued that there was nothing of “public interest” in the e-mails. Clinton’s e-mails became a major issue during the 2016 presidential election campaign, with some of the revelations so damaging to Clinton’s presidential hopes she and her allies in the media began charging that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians to hack into her computers. Clinton deleted thousands of e-mails, so we may never know just how damaging to her reputation other deleted e-mails may have been.
But even those e-mails that are still available, such as those released by Judicial Watch, give us an idea of how Clinton made decisions on what to say in Saudi Arabia.
When Clinton was going to speak at the women’s university in Saudi Arabia, her aide Huma Abedin asked her mother, Saleha Abedin, to review the speech and offer suggestions.
After reading the speech, her mother responded in an e-mail, “This document needs major edits and corrections.” She told her daughter that certain terms such as “freedom” and “empowerment of women” needed to be cut out of the talk.
“Do not even mention driving for women!” she added.
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