Mush From the Wimp: Obama, Orwell and National-Security Psychobabble

With its unprecedented decision to sanitize the basic document defining U.S. national security strategy – cleanse from it terms that connect Islam to terror, jihad, extremism and the like – President Obama is once again propagating Orwellian babble.

And there’s little doubt but that the MSM are primed to parrot far and wide, as opposed to critically assess, the president’s now squeaky clean, official vocabulary of defense. Even after the carnage of 9/11, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews could only bring himself vaguely to identify the attacks as “criminal acts of terror” – selecting out the unpalatable fact that all the terrorists were Islamic radicals.

The administration’s latest rhetorical sleight of hand is just the latest evidence of its zeal for obfuscating the true nature of the terrorist threat. Recall the bizarre memo, originating from Obama’s Office of Management and Budget that instructed Defense Department staffers to use the term “Overseas Contingency Operation” in place of “Long War” or “Global War on Terror.”

Steven Emerson, a leading expert on terrorism, has called Obama’s avoidance of associating radical Islam with terror “absurd” and “dangerous.” Islamic extremism in its many manifestations (Al Qaeda, Hamas, etc.) is in fact, he shows, responsible for three decades of “murder or attempted murder of tens of thousands of civilians in nearly every corner of the globe.” Banning the word Islamic from the designation “Islamic terrorists”

… does not diminish the willingness to use violence or the religious hatred that radical Muslims hold for Jews and the United States. What the self-sanitization does is to exonerate Muslim leaders from having to confront the monster in their own communities, monsters that in many cases they helped create. Because it is radical Islamist groups–feigning recognition as civil-rights organizations, often with the connivance of news organizations and even government agencies–that have deliberately tried to erase the distinction between moderate Islam and radical Islam. Why? So these groups can tar anyone who criticizes militant Islam as a racist or Islamophobe or as someone trying to portray the U.S. at war with the religion itself.

We are at war with these monsters, and for our own president to shrink from naming them – denying before the world the religious fanaticism that motivates them to perpetrate violence against us and our allies – is to help to doom us by losing this war.

The purging of the language – meaning, intent and guidance – of our leading national security blueprint must not be allowed to stand. Call the enemy by its rightful name, Mr. President.