In “Obama Tries to Eradicate Radical Islam: Not from America, but from America’s mindset” at Pajamas Media (via Middle East Forum), our old friend Raymond Ibrahim discusses the unreality of Obama’s policies regarding the global jihad:
The Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all words that allude to Islam from important national security documents. Put differently, the Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all knowledge and context necessary to confront and defeat radical Islam (news much welcomed by Islamist organizations like CAIR). While this move may reflect a naively therapeutic administration — an Obama advisor once suggested that Winnie the Pooh should inform U.S foreign policy — that Obama, the one U.S. president who best knows that politically correct niceties will have no effect on the Muslim world is enforcing this ban, is further troubling.
An Associated Press report has the disturbing details:
President Barack Obama’s advisers plan to remove terms such as “Islamic radicalism” from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counterterrorism officials say.
First off, how, exactly, does the use of terms such as “Islamic radicalism” indicate that the U.S. views “Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism”? It is the height of oversensitivity to think that the so-called “Muslim street” can be antagonized by accurate words in technical U.S. documents — documents they don’t know or care about — especially since the Arabic media itself often employs such terms. Surely we can use “Islamic radicalism” to define, well, Islamic radicals, without simultaneously viewing all Muslims “through the lens of terrorism”? Just as surely as we can use words like “Nazism” to define white supremacists, without viewing all white nations through the lens of racism?