Language Arts

As Andy notes, President Obama’s insistence today that only dumb Republicans make a fetish of the language we use to describe our enemies in the war on terrorism contradicts his own administration’s and party’s insistence that the language is of immense importance. They have made a fetish out of not using the term ”radical Islam”–and other terms too. In this case, Obama is following in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps: She too has gone from insisting that referring to “radical Islamic terrorism” is a big strategic mistake to saying that she can’t understand all this fuss about words.

The line between phrases describing violent Muslim extremists that are fine for leaders to use and those that are immoral and strategically mistaken keeps shifting. In 2009, John Brennan said that the Obama administration disavowed the term “jihadism” because it supposedly gives terrorists credit for being religious and makes it sound as though we are at war with all Muslims. In 2015, Clinton said that we should use the term “jihadism” and avoid “radical Islamic terrorism” because the latter . . . gives terrorists credit for being religious and makes it sound as though we are at war with all Muslims.

The lines shift because they don’t make any sense. I wrote about this a bit last year:

All this tortured diction is pointless. We’re at war with people who believe that Islam justifies mass murder. There’s no way to conduct that war without giving some people the impression that we’re at war with Islam, period.

I think there’s a hidden argument behind this delicacy about terminology. What motivates it, if I’m right, is not just a concern that using the wrong terms will grant legitimacy to terrorists and convince non-violent Muslims we’re against them. There’s also a concern that the wrong terms will convince non-Muslim Americans to think we’re at war with Muslims, too, and thus encourage bigotry. But this seems like a self-defeating tactic. If our choices are to view all Muslims as our enemies or to insist that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” as Clinton has said, some people are going to choose door number one.