War on Terror Ends?
There is a fantastic article at Human Events about the increasing amount of political correctness being applied to branding the War on Terror and the terms that we must refrain from using to describe our enemy.
Here’s an excerpt of a couple of the key points:
Good news: the war on terror is over! Charles Allen, the Department of Homeland Security’s senior intelligence official, said last week that American officials should stop calling this conflict we’re in a “war on terror,” far less the president’s term, the “global war on terror.”
Why? Because it offends Muslims, of course. When they hear “terror,” you see, this hurts the feelings of peaceful non-terrorist Muslims. “[It] has nothing to do with political correctness,” insisted Allen, straining credulity well past the breaking point. “It is interpreted in the Muslim world as a war on Islam and we don’t need this.”
Why on earth would they get the idea that a “war on terror” equals a “war on Islam,” when President Bush has gone out of his way to say things like this: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke explained: “We are at war with terrorism, and its underlying ideology — not Islam — and we’ve gone out of our way to make that point. In truth, war has been declared upon us.” But who has declared war against us?
Of course, it wasn’t generic terrorists, or the IRA or the Tamil Tigers. Rather, it was Muslims who quote the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad to justify waging war against unbelievers.
And here’s the fundamental point–a very important one at that:
To avoid discussing or examining the Islamic element of today’s global jihad also hinders our understanding of the jihadists’ motivations. We cannot investigate what they believe and why, much less strategize on the basis of such investigations, because that will lead us to examine elements of Islam’s theology of jihad that the Department of Homeland Security would apparently rather ignore. The fundamentally wrong assumption in the DHS today is that jihad is a good thing, a holy thing, and that the jihadists have twisted its meaning it in defiance of Islamic theology and law.
They apparently believe — again wrongly — that if we start using different terms to refer to the jihadists and their activities — criminals, unlawful warfare, rather than jihadists and jihad — the moderate Muslim majority will feel empowered to rise up against them, and take back Islam.
This is right on point. This incessant need to be politically correct in describing our enemy is getting to a point where it just might get us all killed.
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