Rashad Hussein and Obama’s pandering to the Islamic Conference

Controversy is swirling around President Barack Obama’s choice of a young American Muslim lawyer, Rashad Hussain, to serve as his special envoy to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Behind this fracas looms the even larger question of whether the U.S. should be sending the OIC any special envoy at all.

The tussle over Hussain has so far come down mainly to a he-said/she-said dispute over an article published in 2004 by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The reporter, Shereen Kandil, quoted Hussain as saying that Sami al-Arian–a man who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid a terrorist group–was the victim of “politically motivated persecutions." Somehow that quote later disappeared from the online article. Fox News reports that Kandil stands by her original account. A White House official, defending Hussain, told Fox this week that the quote came not from Hussain but from al-Arian’s daughter.

Obama, in announcing Rashad Hussain’s appointment on Feb. 13, praised him as “an accomplished lawyer and trusted member of my staff." Obama said Hussain has played a “key role" in developing the ties Obama called for in his June address from Cairo to the Muslim world, adding that Hussain is “a hafiz of the Qur’an"–meaning that he has memorized the entire Koran.

There may be no way to prove who said what in 2004. But while we wait to learn more about Rashad Hussain, it’s also worth taking a look at the outfit with which he will be engaging.

Founded at an Islamic summit in Morocco in 1969, the OIC describes itself on its Web site as “the collective voice of the Muslim world"–though in reality many of its members are rulers of states in which the people themselves have no free voice, such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya and Iran. The OIC began with 30 members and today boasts 57 member “states." (Though that’s inaccurate, because one of those 57 members listed by the OIC is Palestine, which is not a state.) But the OIC, dedicated to spreading its own vision of a new world order, enjoys a propaganda coup every time someone carelessly refers to its 57 “member states," instead of its 56 states plus the Palestinian Authority.

The OIC is headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is dedicated in its documents to spreading Islamic law, or sharia. Its Web site says it has “the singular honor to galvanize the Ummah into a unified body"–and it defines the Ummah as all Muslims of the world.
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This campaign has been reflected at the United Nations, where the OIC’s 56 members plus the Palestinian observer form one of the biggest and most influential lobbying blocs in the UN’s 192-member General Assembly. The OIC itself holds an observer seat as well, which gives it a prime spot for getting involved in UN debates and resolutions.

This amounts to a bonanza for the OIC, which on the financial front hitches a ride effectively subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. While the U.S. alone pays 22% of the UN’s $2.3 billion annual core budget and gets one vote on how the money is used, all the 57 OIC members put together pay less than 5% and get 56 votes. On top of that the U.S. contributes many billions more for such UN ventures as peacekeeping, food aid, refugee relief and so forth. The OIC doesn’t come close.

But the OIC does have its passions. The OIC has been a big backer of a campaign at the UN for “anti-blasphemy" rules that would effectively gag free speech and muffle any real debate about the nature and direction of Islam. The OIC is also one of the big reasons the UN has not been able to come up with a viable definition of terrorism. The point of disagreement is that the OIC, while condemning terrorism, has a record of then qualifying that by redefining terrorism to exclude “the exercise of legitimate right of peoples to resist foreign occupation."

The OIC has also backed some disturbing candidates for important UN posts. Recent examples include Libya’s Ali Treki, now serving as the 2009-10 president of the UN General Assembly, as well as backing Sudan, Syria and Iran for important posts overseeing the UN’s cultural organization, UNESCO.

Iran has at times played an interesting role in the OIC, such as its co-chairing of a July 2008 meeting of the UN and OIC in Geneva. At that meeting, which included plans for the UN to explore ways of spreading Islamic law, the OIC was represented by one of Iran’s former ambassadors to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi. This is the same Salehi who was appointed last year by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as chief of Iran’s nuclear program.

It’s the kind of thing that lies behind the polished façade of the OIC. There’s a strong case to be made that this organization should not be dignified by the attentions of any American special envoy. The post was created by President George Bush, who first appointed a special envoy to the OIC in 2008 and that may well have been a mistake from the start. If contact with the OIC is wanted, the U.S. Mission to the UN in New York already has easy access. And Obama already has a special envoy to Muslim communities.

But given that Obama is following Bush’s lead and sending a special envoy to the OIC, it’s a strange priority that one of Hussain’s prime credentials listed by Obama is his total recall of the Koran. That would make more sense as a core credential for a special envoy from the OIC. The real question is whether Rashad Hussain will vigorously represent and defend the interests, values and constitution of the U.S. If not, far better to have no special envoy to the OIC at all.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly columnon foreign affairs for Forbes.