"We are not at war with Islam; we are at war with the people who have perverted Islam". That from President Obama today sounds like a new and significant change in administration policy. For perhaps the first time, they are on the record as calling this a war. But the childish back-and-forth over what to call the enemy marches on, the President demonstrating that he is still as timid as ever when it comes to risking upsetting the political correctness faction of his party by making any direct reference to Islam.
It may seem like mere semantics, but it really does matter. We have to have some way of intelligently discussing the people with whom we are at war, and that calls for a mutually agreed upon glossary of terms. The White House has a penchant for the innocuous "violent extremist". But, no, that doesn't get it. That could include everyone from Timothy McVeigh to the IRA to the Manson family to the Somali pirates to the Mexican cartels. We have to be more specific and come up with a label for this one particular group, one that clearly describes them as they really are: a bloodthirsty cult made up of a handful of radicalized quasi-Muslim leaders and an army of thousands of unprincipled ne'er-do-wells and street gangsters blindly following along for the thrill of the kill. How do you describe that in two words or less?
Maybe that is a call our Middle Eastern coalition partners should make. After all, their religion is the one having its name and reputation slandered. Their neighborhood is the war zone. Their citizens are overwhelmingly the ones being terrorized. And it is becoming pretty obvious that this is their war to lead. Maybe it should be up to the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Kurds and the others to decide how they wish to refer to this common enemy. If they can come up with a description that omits reference to their religion, that should be good enough for the rest of us. We should respect that decision and add that terminology to our lexicon.
No comments:
Post a Comment