Nearly six years after 9/11, nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center -- and proclaiming "Islam is peace" -- President Bush has learned nothing.
In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored "America's respect for the Muslim faith here at home." Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) "to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence," the president announced that the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group. "Our special envoy," the president said, "will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America's views and values."
What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by sharia -- which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without much in terms of human rights.
Hmm. Might Bush -- or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military -- notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam's still peace, according to the president. Those pesky "extremists" fighting jihad are not, he said, "the true face of Islam."
There Imam Bush goes again. "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam," jailed Islamic scholar Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. "Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"
No. He's just leader of the Free World -- a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.