So says Steve Emerson in “Radical Outreach: Bush coddles American apologists for radical Islam” in National Review (thanks to Looney Tunes):
At Wednesday”s rededication ceremony of the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., President Bush missed a perfect opportunity to repudiate apologism for radical Islam, and instead announced his latest plan to get the Muslim world to stop hating America: appoint a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
Bush praised the OIC, saying, “We admire and thank those Muslims who have denounced what the Secretary General of the OIC called “˜radical fringe elements who pretend that they act in the name of Islam.– The special envoy”s mission, Bush said, would be to “listen and learn” to OIC ambassadors.
While this may sound nice, it is rooted in complete ignorance of the rampant radicalism, pro-terrorist, and anti-American sentiments routinely found in statements by the OIC and its leaders, including referring to “Islamophobia” “” and not the mass slaughter of innocents in the name of Islam “” the “worst form of terrorism,” as OIC did last May.
In 2002, the OIC published its “Declaration on International Terrorism.” Therein, the authors stated, amongst other outrageous claims, that there was no such thing as Palestinian terrorism, writing, “We reject any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.” To the OIC, groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hezbollah are not terrorists, but “freedom fighters.”
Read it all.