The Muslim World Congress (slogan: “Good for Muslims, Good for the World”) Â approves of Sada Cumber. See, Bush and Condollleeeezzza can be trusted to make the right decisions, right? Right???
  “Our man in the Middle East”- America’s “envoy”  Sada Cucumber- went to Arabia  to “delegitimise terrorists” while OIC Secretary General Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu has been very outspoken in condemning terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, making it clear that Islam in no way permits the taking of innocent lives.  (WoJ readers would know that Islam has no concept of ‘innocents’ but considers unbelievers guilty of the crime of -you guessed it- unbelief. Only Muslims are innocent and those who resist the Islamization of the West must be killed, forcibly converted or defeated so they will pay the jiziyah ‘with willing submission while feeling humiliated and subdued’/ed)
JEDDAH – The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) is laying “what I consider to be a very constructive role,” Sada Cumber told Khaleej Times. Â (Shoo nuff, Sada. We are quite sure that you have a very constructive role in deconstructing the infidel nation-state in order to bring it under Islamic rule, the sharia…/ed)
He said that the OIC Secretary General Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu has been very outspoken in condemning terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, making it clear that Islam in no way permits the taking of innocent lives.
“This public posture is an important step in helping to delegitimise terrorists,” he stressed. Cumber, who took over as US Special Envoy to the OIC in March, said the purpose of his appointment is to better understand the organisation, its goals and perspectives, as well as how it works with member countries to address a wide range of issues.
He explained that in travelling to many of those countries in recent months he had been able to develop a solid understanding of the needs and priorities many of those countries share.   “My sincere hope is that in strengthening theUS relationship with the OIC, we can find opportunities to advance shared goals, such as health, education, economic development, as well as dialogue and understanding between the United States and Muslim communities around the world,” he said.
Prior to his appointment, he was an entrepreneur and investor based in Austin, Texas. He has vast experience in senior management, marketing and imaging technology, and has specialised in national and global strategy, strategic marketing, business planning and institution building.
He has founded 11 companies in technology-based industries, as well as Texas Global, an international strategic advising firm, and CACH Capital Management, an investment advisory and wealth management firm. Born in Karachi,Pakistan, he holds a bachelor’s degree in commerce and a master’s degree in history both from the University ofKarachi. Asked how he finds being in the midst of the ‘United Nations of the Muslim world,’ he said
“Anytime you create an administrative entity of this kind there will be challenges. Coming from the private sector as I did, the introduction to the State Department was quite a challenge.  There is a process for everything, and sometimes the process can frankly be slow and somewhat tiresome. This is also true of the organisation, as of any bureaucracy. However, I would say that in general I have been very impressed with the dedication and professionalism of the OIC Secretariat, starting with the Secretary General and including all the working level staff I have had the privilege of meeting,” he said.
Asked if he foresaw more US appointments (Special Envoy), such as to the Arab League, and other similar organisations in the region and the world, he said he could not predict whether similar appointme
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OIC Favours International Law Against “Defamation of Religion”
Habib Shaikh (KT EXCLUSIVE)
JEDDAH – “The growing trend of Islamophobia that seeks to defame and denigrate Islam through distortion and misperception and subject Muslims to face racially motivated discrimination and xenophobic treatment, is an issue of great concern for Muslims,” Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, OIC Secretary General, told Khaleej Times in an exclusive interview here.
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Asked if this issue could be brought in the ambit of the interfaith dialogue initiated by the Custodian of  Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, and the Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilisations, and how helpful would that be, the secretary-general said that the interfaith dialogues and the Global Agenda for Dialogue among Civilisations are forums designed to pave the way for a better understanding among different cultures, religions, and civilisations.
“The OIC has no agenda against any religion, rather (it) has full respect for religious and cultural diversity,” he said and added that the organisation has been pro-active in its interaction with Western institutions including governments, regional organisations, academics, media and the civil society to raise awareness of the dangerous consequences of the rising phenomenon of Islamophobia.
“We seek a meaningful and result-oriented dialogue that would bring about the understanding of the correct image of Islam and to develop a culture of tolerance among civilisations,” he said.
“When we can do this, we are confident that we will be able to effectively neutralise those who use religion to foment terror, intolerance, mistrust and violence,” he added.
Ihsanoglu said the 60th Session of the UN General Assembly adopted the OIC-Group sponsored Resolution No. 60/150 on ‘Combating Defamation of Religions,’ in 2005, which called for the urgent need to respect beliefs and disallow their defamation.
The resolution also reflected the international community’s views, concerns and willingness to eliminate any discrimination towards Muslims or defamation of Islam.
“However, for your information, Pakistan brought the first ‘defamation of religions’ resolution, entitled ‘Defamation of Islam,’ to the then UN Human Rights Commission in 1999,” he said.
In the resolution passed in March 2008, the Human Rights Council (which replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006) urged all UN member states “to provide, within their respective legal and constitutional systems, adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from the defamation of any religion” and stated that while “everyone has the right to freedom of expression. The exercise of this right carries with it special duties and responsibilities, and may therefore be subject to certain restrictions.”
The UN General Assembly has passed a ‘defamation of religions’ resolution in each of its last three sessions from 2005 to 2007.
As always in any issue, in this case also proponents and opponents are putting forward and propagating their respective views.
The two main are the  Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the United States, respectively.
The resolution aims to amend the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and make it a criminal act and violation of international law to defame another religion.
He said that the OIC-sponsored resolution on combating defamation of religions was adopted by the 5th, 6th, and 7th Sessions of the UN Human Rights Council, and the United Nations General Assembly has successively passed the same on this issue since 2005.
The UN Resolution was adopted by both OIC and non-OIC countries voting in favour.  However, 50 countries, including the European Union and the United States, voted against.
“We believe that the decision to vote against was probably motivated by their perception that the resolution might conflict with freedom of expression which is not the case,”  Ihsanoglu said.
He stressed that the concern for racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance is global and shared by the entire international community.  “The OIC is fully committed to the UDHR and freedom of expression,” he added.
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* Sada Cucumber to the front:
Sada Cumber, US Special Envoy to the OIC, said he believed that the United States could be a useful model for addressing some of the issues raised by this resolution.
“In my country, freedom of speech is paramount and is protected by the Constitution. Citizens are entitled to criticise public officials, religious leaders, policies to which they object,” he said.  “My fear is that such a resolution would be viewed by some as justification to restrict freedom of speech and limit public dialogue on faith issues. I believe these are questions best left to civil society to address according to local need, and not by UN resolution,” he added.Cumber said that President (George) Bush has been very supportive of the interfaith dialogue of King Abdullah, “and I agree with him that this is an important initiative.”
He said that the US will look for ways to promote such dialogue whenever and wherever possible. “For my part, I believe the United States is an excellent model of how interfaith dialogue can be conducted and the benefits that accrue from it.
As a nation of immigrants, the United States boasts people from all faiths, and there is peaceful and constructive interaction between those faiths in small towns and large cities across the country,” he said.
“I believe that one of the great strengths of the United States is its diversity, and the fact that people of all origins and all faiths can work, live, and prosper — as Americans,” Cumber added.
Ihsanoglu said that the 57 member countries comprising the OIC are committed to democratic principles and upholding human rights.
This is substantiated in the various OIC resolutions, declarations and documents including the OIC Ten Year Programme of Action, national constitutions as well as in the statements of the leaders of the member states and the OIC. He explained that in view of the unhappy experiences of violence and divisions created in societies by the acts of some motivated people who have taken the cover of freedom of expression to cause insult and create violence through incendiary statements, publications and films, the OIC group felt that it would serve the interests of all societies to have a consensus resolution that would make the perpetrators of religious hatred accountable for their actions and to bring in responsibility in the exercise of freedom of expression.
He said that the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with social, cultural, and humanitarian issues, adopted the OIC Group sponsored ‘defamation of religions’ resolution on November 24, 2008.
The OIC Group explained that the text incorporated the concerns of many delegations that all religions be covered by the text and not just Islam. The OIC Group mentioned that although Islam was usually at the core of such acts, it did not preclude the possibility that other religions could be targeted later.
Fitzgerald: A tribute to Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu is the Turkish “historian of Islamic science” whose outward appearance is so deceptively modern and secular and sweet-reasonable. Then one realizes that that is merely camouflage and that his mental baggage, while not quite as primitive as that of the qaradawis and tantawis, is from the same product line manufactured by Islamic Tourister.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu was carefully chosen to assume the position of head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as the most moderate and presentable (to the Infidels) person, after the bad impression left by Mohamad Mahathir’s celebrated rant. He has since then been beavering away at the OIC’s pet project, a transparent attempt at across-the-globe censorship of criticism of Islam. It is an attempt that constitutes an assault on the advanced, Western world, whose citizens are being threatened if they dare to exercise their right of free speech about what Ihsanoglu primly and self-righteously calls a “religion” (as if that conferred some kind of special immunity).
But Islam is an all-encompassing ideology, a Total Belief-System that presumes to regulate every detail of a man’s life, and offers a Complete Explanation of the universe. Furthermore, it places great emphasis on inculcating the idea that all of humanity is divided between Muslims and non-Muslims, Believers and Infidels. Muslims are taught that between the two there must exist a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare), and that all Muslims have a duty, central and not tangential, to participate in some way in the “struggle” or Jihad to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.
Islam is a politics, Islam is a geopolitics. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu knows that, but he doesn’t want the world’s Infidels to find that out, or to discuss it among themselves, much less to actually criticize it. And so he will do what he can to shut down the exercise, in the Western world (and elsewhere in the non-Muslim lands), of our right to free speech, a right that could not possibly exist for one minute in the lands where Islam dominates, and Muslims rule. But in the advanced West, as one of its achievements, such a right has been won and is now exercised, possibly not quite as impressively, or with as much gratitude, as it might be — but the important thing is the right, the untrammelled right.
Does Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu want Infidels to read the Qur’an? The Hadith? The Sira? Does he want them to read the histories — the histories written by Muslims, for god’s sake — about the Muslim conquests, and the subsequent mass killings and subjugation of non-Muslims? What does he want us to find out about Islam? What is in the glossy brochures prepared by assorted Ministries of Islamic Propaganda, or by individual smiling imams (the kind who keep getting picked up later for connections to terrorism, or are revealed later, after they have decamped back to a Muslim land, to have made all kinds of disturbing and even blood-curdling remarks)? Is that it?
Amazing, isn’t it, the real outrage, the genuine fury, that we should actually find out what Islam inculcates, and connect it to the recorded behavior of Muslims over the past 1350 years, and to the observable behavior of so many Muslims today, as we open our newspapers or turn on our radios and televisions, and piece together what might well be a separate section of the paper or segment of the broadcast, to be called The Jihad News.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu was chosen to be the head of the O.I.C. because he was a “moderate” Turkish Muslim and a presumably respectable “historian of science.” But he turns out to be not that but rather an historian, and defender, of “Islamic” science, who attempts to tortuously explain away the absence of science in the Islamic world since its brief flourishing thanks to Christians, Jews, and those who, while they were called Muslims, were only a generation or two away from being something else, in a milieu still heavily influenced by non-Muslim elements — which, when greatly reduced, also reduced the atmosphere in which science could be conducted.
That bizarre figure, Ziauddin Sarkar, was somehow permitted to review, in the pages of the British journal “Nature,” the large claims made on behalf of “Ottoman” — i.e., “Islamic” science — by Ihsanoglu. Some of Ihsanoglu’s attempts to explain why such things as the clock did not develop in the East but only in the West (you see, since the early clocks were not sufficiently accurate for Muslims to rely on them for knowing when it was time for prayers, they did not think it worth using them, or trying to improve them) raise far more disturbing questions about the Muslim mindset than Dr. Ihsanoglu apparently realized.
Why did an editor at Nature give the job of reviewing Ekheleddin Ihsanoglu’s book to the apologist Ziauddin Sarkar? And who at Science allowed to be published his puff-piece about “Islamic science,” with every cliche that no historian of mathematics, or science, or technology — not Giorgio di Santillana, not Crombie, not Charles Singer, not a hundred others — would have permitted?
What is happening when standards, supposedly so rigorous at “Science” or at “Nature,” are so obviously non-existent, and both journals become, rightly, the object of ridicule?
Then there is this, taken from a web-site that follows the OIC:
In March 2006, OIC General Secretary Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu embraced Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal at a press conference at OIC’s headquarters. Ihsanoglu whitewashed: “With its win, Hamas begins a new stage in the development of the Palestinian issue. We assure that Hamas will deal with all national and international requirements in a practical and logical way.”At a “special session” of the OIC in August of the same year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for “the elimination of the Zionist regime,” a statement that OIC failed to condemn. Moreover, the OIC has repeatedly backed Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As Ishanoglu said in April, ‘All member states of the OIC and I have obviously supported Iran’s right to access peaceful nuclear technology,’ despite clear indications that the Iranian regime’s uranium-enrichment program is designed chiefly to make nuclear weapons.
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And there is the OIC’s explaining away of the 9/11 attacks, which “expressed the frustration, disappointment, and disillusion that are festering deep in the Muslims’ soul towards the aggressions and discriminations committed by the West.”
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu is also the one who, at the time of the death riots and Muslim riots over those anodyne cartoons in a Danish paper, solemnly likened the effect of those cartoons on Muslims as being akin to the effect on Infidels of the mass murders carried out by Muslims on 9/11.
Finally, Ihsanoglu has explained to an American audience how splendid was the system of “protection” that Islam offered Christians and Jews — “protection” offered by Muslims, for the payment of Jizyah, from those same Muslims. A system that would have impressed Al Capone. He helpfully explained that the “privilege of becoming a protected minority via an act of dhimmiship was given only to the followers of a prophet to whom a sacred book was revealed.”
Christians and Jews, because you are the lucky “followers of a prophet” — Moses, Jesus (that is, the Muslim Moses, the Muslim Jesus) — you will enjoy, when Muslim rule comes everywhere, the same “privilege of becoming a protected minority via an act of dhimmiship” that Christians and Jews have enjoyed in the Middle East, and elsewhere in Muslim-ruled lands, for so long.
So what’s your problem? Never satisfied? What’s the reason Islam is not pleasin’ you?
In defining “dhimmiship” as the “privilege of becoming a protected minority,” Dr. Ihsanoglu did his best. But those who are so solicitious of the public image of Islam and of Muslims realize that it should not be left up just to NPR, or the BBC, or Le Monde; we all have to pitch in, and do our bit. It might be better if “dhimmi” were to be jettisoned altogether. The word upsets Infidels, and it does nothing for Muslims, either.
Instead of “dhimmis,” why not call them “Friends With Benefits”?
Islam is not merely a bunch of rituals of individual worship, or an explanation of how the universe came to be. It is, more importantly, also a politics and a geopolitics. A man who can present the dhimmi system, and describe the status of the “Protected People” un-ironically as A Good Thing, an Example of Muslim Benevolence and Tolerance, as Ihsanoglu does, is for all of his outward mien, that tie, that Western suit, inwardly as hopelessly primitive as any daggers-and-dishdasha Saudi.