Wednesday, March 26, 2008

O.I.C. clearly now

Mark Steyn

I wrote in National Review last year about the Administration's peculiar decision to appoint the first ever US envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a sort of European Union or British Commonwealth for Muslim countries. Fifty-seven nations (or over a quarter of all sovereign states) are members, and it comprises the largest voting bloc on the new UN Human Rights Council, which is why that body is entirely useless except as the umpteenth rod with which to flay the Zionist Entity.

It seemed a safe bet that whoever got the nod from the State Department for the OIC gig would use it not to disabuse them of their illusions but to peddle a lot of equivalist mush. So meet Sada Cumber:

The technology tycoon who swapped Karachi for Texas 31 years ago, also told AFP in an interview that many major religions face the same kind of "bigotry" as Muslims who have launched a campaign against 'Islamophobia'. The widely debated "clash of civilizations" is really a "clash of ignorance", said Cumber, who this month became the first US special envoy to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and launched his campaign at the 57-nation group's summit in Dakar on Thursday and Friday...

The United States is widely criticised in Muslim states for the Iraq war, the Guantanamo "War on Terror" prison camp and its policy in the Middle East... Polls in the United States indicate however that many Americans are equally suspicious of Muslims, particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks...

Leaders complained widely during the summit about 'Islamophobia' in the West — Muslims portrayed as terrorists, Danish cartoons which lampooned the Prophet Mohammed and an anti-Islam film to be released by a far-right Dutch MP.

Cumber said everyone at the summit understood that only a "minute minority" was involved.

"Very few people do this anti-religion, and they don't leave Jews alone, they don't leave Christians alone and they don't leave Muslims alone."

He added: "They are bigots and bigotry will always be there. So how much time, effort, assets, whatever, do you want to invest in that?"

Quite a lot. The OIC is at the forefront of efforts to, in effect, criminalize any criticism of Islam worldwide, and they're getting quite a lot of support from their patsies in the west. Those who think this demands a more robust response than Ambassador Cumber's might like to join Andy McCarthy, Jay Nordlinger, Cliff May, Stanley Kurtz and yours truly plus Rachel Ehrenfeld, Ibn Warraq and others for a conference on "legal jihad" in New York on April 10th.

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