Our Islamist Envoy

Hussain: Wrong choice for OIC. AFP/Getty Images/Newscom View Enlarged Image

Infiltration: What a tangled web Islamist appointees weave. When his pro-terrorist quotes surfaced, a new White House envoy dismissed them as someone else's. A recording says otherwise.

Now Rashad Hussain, President Obama's pick as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has changed his story. He admits he did indeed call the indictment of a now-convicted terrorist a "travesty of justice."

Politico.com has provided the quotes from a recording of the 2004 event attended by Hussain to the White House for review. In it, Hussain defended confessed terrorist Sami Al-Arian, suggesting the government had railroaded him. A Florida professor, Al-Arian was running a U.S. beachhead for Palestinian terrorists. In a plea deal, he copped to a reduced charge of conspiracy to provide material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a federally designated terror group. In a speech at a Cleveland mosque, Al-Arian once thundered: "Let's damn America, let's damn Israel, let's damn their allies until death."

When the controversy first broke, the White House deferred to the spin of Hussain and the Mideast outfit that scrubbed the offending statements from its Web site. Turns out the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, a Saudi-tied, anti-Israel journal that sells Intifada trinkets, deleted his remarks after receiving a phone call from Hussain. WRMEA once employed Al-Arian's daughter as a staffer. Thanks to the recording, there's now no denying what Hussain said. After this deception, Obama should change his pick for envoy, who would join the OIC, a 57-government Islamic bloc, the largest voting bloc in the U.N.

The OIC is waging an international campaign against "Islamophobia," calling it the real "terrorism." The bloc's assault on free speech includes pressuring the West into passing laws criminalizing criticism of Islam, including motives of jihadists like Al-Arian.

It's plain that Hussain, who also has bashed the Patriot Act and other key anti-terror tools, cannot be trusted to represent U.S. interests vis-a-vis the OIC.

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