Jihad, Islamism and U.S. Envoy to OIC
by Jeffrey Imm

In the global war against Jihad, America's recurring challenge is the unwillingness of its political leadership to confront the fact that political Islamism is an ideological basis for "Islamist terrorism", as defined in the 9/11 Commission Report. This week, while operational war tactics garnered most of the headlines, once again America's political leadership ignored the global challenge of political Islamism, and President Bush announced his selection of a new U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Mr. Sada Cumber of Texas.

The OIC remains the largest international Islamist organization in the world, and it is an organization that consistently leverages political Islamism to attack freedom of speech and press, to attack freedom of religion, to deny that Palestinian and Lebanese Jihadist groups are terrorists, and to promote the anti-freedom ideology of Islamism. In June 2007, when President Bush first indicated plans of such an envoy to the OIC, his plans were met with praise by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation/Hamas trial), and met with condemnation by counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson.

Since then, in December 2007, the OIC attempted to legitimize an anti-freedom Islamist approach towards "religious freedoms" by trying to put a Sharia spin on a UN Human Rights resolution that would have worded the UN resolution to suggest that individuals could rightly be denied the right to "change one's religion." In recent weeks, the OIC's Secretary General has made pronouncements that attack the Western free press in the Muhammad cartoon debate, suggesting that such cartoons will lead "towards a larger conflict... [that would make Muslims] hostages of their radicals."

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