Washington, July 14: The Obama administration recently moved to drop rhetorical references to Islamic radicalism from official speech, and this change can now be seen all the way down to the US military.
President Barack Obama has argued that words matter, and administration officials have said that the use of inflammatory descriptions linking Islam to the terror threat feed the enemy’s propaganda and may alienate moderate Muslims in the US.
Obama reached out to Muslim countries soon after taking office, and made it clear it was one of his early priorities as president. He has praised Islam and its contributions to American life. His new NASA director, Charles Bolden, recently said one of his agency’s goals was to reach out to Muslims “and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations.”
The question of how to frame the conflict against Al-Qaeda and other terrorists has not been easy, especially as the US is trying to mend fences with Muslim communities while toughening its position against militant groups.
As it unveiled its new National Security Strategy last May, administration officials said the shift in emphasis was critical in undercutting Al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray its attacks on the US and the west as a justified holy war.
Terror leaders “play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims,” said top administration counterterrorism deputy John Brennan during a recent speech explaining the policy shift.
He added that “describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.”
“The reality, of course, is that we have never been and will never be at war with Islam. After all, Islam, like so many faiths, is part of America.”
Larry Korb, a military analyst at the Center for American Progress, told reporters that Brennan is correct to avoid linking Islam to terrorism.
“Once you attach a religious thing, you’re basically saying somehow or other this is caused by religion. Most Muslims are not that way,” said Korb.
“If you put that term (Islamic terrorist) on there, it causes you more problems in the long run. You don’t want to see this as a war on ‘the Muslim world.”
When asked how he would define the enemy, Korb told reporters: “Al Qaeda. That’s what we went in there for.”
This train of thought is similar to Brennan’s who said that describing the enemy as Islamists “would actually be counterproductive. It would play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims.”
The US military is also trying to figure out where to draw this fine line.
America’s new top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, wrote the counterinsurgency manual back in 2006, during the Bush Administration, referred to “Islamic insurgents,” “Islamic extremists” and “Islamic subversives.”
But Gen. James Mattis, who was recently picked to head Central Command, where he will oversee US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as across the Middle East, including Iraq and Iran, is well-known for his understanding of the Muslim world.
Mattis who led the Marine offensive to subdue the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, during the height of the insurgency has deliberately chosen not to use phrases like “Islamic fundamentalist” or “jihadist” when describing who the military is fighting.
He calls them, simply, “the enemy” and sees them as the newest in a long line of foes the nation has faced.
“This is an enemy, I want to remind you, who has killed more Muslims than he’s killed Jews or Christians or Hindus. It’s an enemy who knows he cannot win at the ballot box; that’s why they use bombs. They know that nobody is going to vote their medieval message in.”
But several prominent counterterrorism experts, however, are challenging the administration’s shift in its National Security Strategy, saying the terror threat should be defined in order to fight it.
In the report, scheduled to be released this week, counterterrorism experts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy argue that the US could clearly articulate the threat from radical Islamic extremists “without denigrating the Islamic religion in any way.”
In the report, obtained by The Associated Press, said the analysts warn that US diplomacy must sharpen the distinction between the Muslim faith and violent Islamist extremism, identify radicalizers within Islamic communities and empower voices that can contest the radical teachings.
-Agencies