18 Jul 2016 10:05 pm
I worked in the CIA under Bush. Obama is right to not say "radical Islam."
Avoiding the phrase isn't "politically correct." It's strategic.
The recent verbal attacks by the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his supporters on President Barack Obama for avoiding the phrase "radical Islam" in his public pronouncements are simplistic, racially inflammatory — and flatly misinformed.
Settling upon accurate and strategically nuanced terms to describe the post-9/11 enemy is not the product of "political correctness" (contra Trump) or a failure to understand the enemy (contra a much-discussed Atlantic cover story).
Nor are objections to using overly broad terms like "Islamic radicalism" limited to Democrats.
The Bush administration understood the power of words, too.
It concluded that distinctions that may seem small to Christian-American ears make a big difference to the mainstream Muslims we need on our side.
Both the Bush and Obama administration officials have refrained from using "Islamic radicalism" and its variants not because of "political correctness" but because of their nuanced knowledge of the diversity of Islamic ideologies.
The term doesn’t enhance anyone’s knowledge of the perpetrators of terrorism or of the societies that spawn them, and it might hurt us in the global war of ideas.