by Raymond Ibrahim
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
First off, how, exactly, does the use of terms such as "Islamic radicalism" indicate that the
The AP report continues:
Obama's speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist
The analogy is flawed. For starters, in Reagan's era, the Soviet Union, not China, was America's prime antagonist — just as today, Islamic radicals, not Muslims, are America's prime enemy. Moreover, unlike Obama, who would have the
The ultimate problem in the White House's new "words-policy," however, is reflected in this excerpt from the report:
The change [i.e., linguistic obfuscation] would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."
No doubt this important document will soon say something totally meaningless like "The struggle against extremism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century." Such changes bode ill for the future. For it is one thing to carefully choose your words when directly addressing Muslims; it is quite another to censor American analysts and policy-makers from using the necessary terms that conceptualize who the enemy is and what he wants.
The situation is dire. Words aside, there is already a lamentable lack of study concerning Muslim war doctrine in the curriculum of American military studies, including in the Pentagon and U.S. Army War College. Obama's more aggressive censorship program will only exacerbate matters: another recently released strategic document, the QDR, nary mentions anything remotely related to Islam — even as it stresses climate change, which it sees as an "accelerant of instability and conflict" around the world.
At any rate, as I have argued several times before, the U.S. government needs to worry less about which words appease Muslims — another governmental memo warns against "offending," "insulting," or being "confrontational" to Muslims — and worry more about providing its own citizenry with accurate knowledge concerning its greatest enemy.
In short, knowledge is inextricably linked to language. The more generic the language, the less precise the knowledge it imparts; conversely, the more precise the language, the more precise the knowledge. In the conflict against Islamic radicalism, to acquire accurate knowledge, which is essential to victory, we need to begin with accurate language.
This means
Deplorably enough, nearly a decade after the Islamist-inspired attacks of 9/11, far from knowing its enemy, the
Nor is there much room for optimism: If the Obama administration can easily expose
Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum, author of The Al Qaeda Reader, and guest lecturer at the
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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