What Obama SHOULD Call It

Last week, in a speech after the Orlando murder investigation, Barack H. Obama paused in his blaming of Republicans for what happened in Orlando by addressing the matter of -- well, not of radical Islamic terrorism itself, but the term "radical Islamic terrorism."  Words.  Words he doesn't use, at least not together.

Two days after Hillary Clinton said she was "willing to use the term radical Islamic terrorism" but didn't actually use it, here is Obama doing his usual strawman thing, saying that if he used the term, the murders in the gay nightclub in Orlando still wouldn't have been prevented.

As if that's what anyone said the reason for using the term was.  But don't miss a chance for a good strawman, nope.

And although this piece is not about whether Barack Obama agrees to use the term or not, it does matter, after all.  I, for one, want to know whom he, as commander in chief, even thinks that we are fighting in the ongoing war.  That's the conflict that was called the Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT, until Obama ordered the discontinuation of that term for some reason.  If that's not the war anymore, and we have Americans in combat and dropping bombs, then it would be expository to know whom the commander in chief is actually fighting against.

But that's where it gets murky.  While we really don't know what Obama's motivation is for doing what, on the surface, are incredibly stupid and anti-American things like sending prisoners from Guantanamo back to the Middle East to fight against us, he does keep saying that we are "not at war with Islam."

Unfortunately he won't say we are at war with anything except "extremism", which could be anything, from excessive patriotism by, say, Indonesians or Burkina Fasoans, to the religion of Hasidic Jews, to what motivates Chicago Cubs fans.  Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, Barry Goldwater said in 1964, and so it's possible that Obama uses that word because a Republican made it famous.

I don't think we are at war with Islam, either, in the same way we were not at war in 1943 with German-Americans who practiced lederhosen-dancing in Iowa.  They were German, all right, but they weren't fighting.  And certainly the Muslims who are not engaged in bombing marathons and shooting up gay nightclubs, and are not doing the things ISIS is doing to other Muslims in Iraq and Syria, they're not at war with us.  They have a religion called Islam, and they practice it peacefully.

But there is this thing, which is often called not Islam but "Islamism", which is not itself a religion.  Whatever it is, and whatever it should be called (I'll use Islamism here for convenience), it is a political and not a religious driver.  What it is is the movement to install a specific religion, Islam, in the form of a worldwide caliphate, everywhere on earth, and to slaughter all who do not comply.  While Islam is the central theme, Islamism is about political aims, i.e., world domination.

So when we refer to Islamism, we are specifically calling out the political effort to make the world a global caliphate with humans practicing only Islam.  It is not the religion itself.  So there's no reason not to name it.

If there is an easier analogy, we could borrow a page from Obama and refer to the Crusades.  Sure, they happened back in the Middle Ages, but they were to some extent an effort to force Catholicism on an unwilling people, at the point of the sword.  It is not a normal practice of the actual faith of Catholicism to kill people until they converted, certainly not since 1500 or so, any more than it should be a normal practice of Islam.

Except, of course, that there is nothing in the Bible to be interpreted as doing missionary work at the point of a sword, and there are plenty of people reading that into the Koran.  Oh yeah, and the last Crusade-like pursuit was in the 14th Century, while Islamists killing people who don't convert to Islam or, for example, simply live in the USA (or France) is going on now.  2016.

What we are fighting against, and certainly should be willing to say we are fighting against, is Islamism, and our battle, to be joined by our allies once we have a president whom they can actually trust, is against radical Islamist terrorism -- not Islam.  There is no reason on God's green earth that Barack Obama should not stand up in front of the country, explain the difference -- it is pretty easy; I just did it -- and start using the term "radical Islamist terrorism."

At least we'd have a name for the guy on the other side we're trying to stop.  And we would know a little bit better what the heck the president is thinking.  Or smoking.

If he is ever willing to tell us.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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