Foreign Policy magazine, in a piece published on Friday,
tackles the issue of semantics and political correctness when U.S. officials
talk about the war against terrorism and ISIS in particular.
The president, administration officials and Democratic presidential
candidates refuse to use the term “radical Islam” when discussing the Middle
East, prompting Republicans to declare that such obfuscation shows a basic
weakness in the opposing party’s dedication to defeating ISIS militants.
say ‘radical Islam,’ these very words, in fact, are commonly used in Arabic
across the Middle East: Islam mutatarrif,” writes
Kim Ghattas of Foreign Policy.
“When I asked a handful of friends in Beirut — Muslim and non-Muslim — what
they thought of Democrats refusing to use those two words to describe what
drives militant groups like the so-called Islamic State, they seemed puzzled …”
PC Democrats cautious
The PC Democrats
don’t want to give the impression that Islam is a religion with radical
tendencies because that could feed the jihadist narrative of “the West vs.
Islam.” At the Democratic presidential debate on Nov. 14, one day after the Paris attacks, Bernie Sanders managed to get through the entire event without once speaking the word “Islam.”
Yet, FP reports
that most people outside of the United States do not differentiate between
statements by various Republicans or Democrats and administration officials.
Discussions about reforming Muslim teachings is already “much
more audacious” in small pockets of the Middle East than any public debates ongoing in the United States, including by Muslim-Americans, according
to Ghattas.
‘Daesh’ is a dud
Muslims have urged caution in giving the ISIS militants more legitimacy than
they deserve, to little effect.
Here’s how
Ghattas describes the situation:
“French officials,
and increasingly Obama administration officials, have obliged. Both have taken
to using the word ‘Daesh’ to describe the organization, not wanting to use terminology
that includes the word ‘Islamic.’ But nothing peeves Arabic-speakers more as a
useless exercise in semantics, because Daesh is simply the Arabic acronym for
the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham — al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi
al-Iraq wa al-Sham. In other words, it incorporates the term Islamic
as much as the English-language acronym.
spoke to all came up with variations on the same terms to describe militants
using violence to achieve their aims: “Jihadist Islamists” or “Islamist
extremists.” This helps narrow the description to what is a very specific
modern political ideology and … to make sure that the starting point in the
debate is not the average Muslim, practicing his five pillars of the faith.”
