Terrorism expert Steve Emerson is just as dismayed by President Bush’s pandering to radicals at the Islamic Center of Washington DC as I am: Radical Outreach.

The President’s idea of an envoy who will “learn” from the Organization of the Islamic Conference is simply ludicrous.

At Wednesday’s rededication ceremony of the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., President Bush missed a perfect opportunity to repudiate apologism for radical Islam, and instead announced his latest plan to get the Muslim world to stop hating America: appoint a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

Bush praised the OIC, saying, “We admire and thank those Muslims who have denounced what the Secretary General of the OIC called ‘radical fringe elements who pretend that they act in the name of Islam.’” The special envoy’s mission, Bush said, would be to “listen and learn” to OIC ambassadors.

While this may sound nice, it is rooted in complete ignorance of the rampant radicalism, pro-terrorist, and anti-American sentiments routinely found in statements by the OIC and its leaders, including referring to “Islamophobia” — and not the mass slaughter of innocents in the name of Islam — the “worst form of terrorism,” as OIC did last May.

In 2002, the OIC published its “Declaration on International Terrorism.” Therein, the authors stated, amongst other outrageous claims, that there was no such thing as Palestinian terrorism, writing, “We reject any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.” To the OIC, groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hezbollah are not terrorists, but “freedom fighters.”

This is just the beginning of a litany of the OIC’s wrongs. 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.

And then, there is 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.”

There’s more. Read the whole thng…