http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/organization-of-islamic-cooperation-on-the-defensive-over-shariah-in-america
For all who’ve been working hard to educate Americans on the facts about Islamic Law (shariah), there are some encouraging signals. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its affiliated network, including the Muslim Brotherhood in America, would seem to be in full-on defensive mode about shariah if a recent Brotherhood conference and a couple of new reports are indicative.
At the Muslim American Society (MAS)-Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) conference in Chicago, Illinois 21-25 December 2012, a few thousand mostly Arabic speaking Muslims circled the wagons for a five-day program aimed at rousing them to defense of Islam. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), acknowledged in the Brotherhood’s 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” as one of its organizations, and the Muslim American Society (MAS) co-sponsored the 11th Annual MAS-ICNA Convention. The Convention speakers roster featured Tariq Ramadan, scion of the Brotherhood’s al-Banna founding family; Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of HAMAS’ U.S. branch, CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations); Siraj Wahhaj, Imam of the al-Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn, NY and included on a list of unindicted co-conspirators from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial; and Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front group in the U.S.
The Convention theme of “Renaissance” was all about getting American Muslims to experience a “double revolution in intellect and psychology,” as Ramadan put it, so they’d be energized enough to stand up to an alleged atmosphere of “Islamophobia” in the U.S. that has shariah in its sights. This theme, of course, is straight out of the OIC’s “Islamophobia Observatory” which hyperventilates about such things at Foreign Ministers meetings and in regular reports posted to its website.
A 19 January 2013 report from the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center entitled, “A Rights Agenda For The Muslim World,” presents a full-throated apologia for the OIC’s allegedly frustrated efforts to get its recalcitrant member states to integrate shariah with modern international standards on human rights. The problem seems to be that the OIC allows some of those countries with a “conservative brand of Islam” too much leeway to cling to their “emphasis on national sovereignty,” which just wrecks the OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s sincere efforts to implement more effective “supra-national human rights mechanisms.” Apparently, according to the report’s author, Turan Kayaoglu, Ihsanoglu wants to make human rights the centerpiece of the OIC agenda, which Turan says “shows a gradual move away from emphasizing the centrality of shariah.” Supposedly, Ihsanoglu increasingly is willing to “discuss these issues in the context of international human rights rather than exclusively within that of Islamic law and tradition.” A quick check of the OIC website shows the “Islamophobia Observatory” is still up and the Human Rights page features the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 (the one about restricting free speech criticism of Islam) and other items about “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping, and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons, based on religion or belief”-i.e., Islam.
