Speak No Evil: Un-Naming the Enemy

U.S. aims to unlink Islamic, terrorism

Washington Times
Article published May 7, 2008

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL - U.S. officials are being advised in internal government documents to avoid referring publicly to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahedeen, which "unintentionally legitimize" terrorism.

"There' s a growing consensus [in the Bush administration] that we need to move away from that language," said a former senior administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue.

Instead, in two documents circulated last month by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the multiagency center charged with strategic coordination of the U.S. war on terror, officials are urged to use terms such as violent extremists, totalitarian and death cult to characterize al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "

Avoid labeling everything 'Muslim.' It reinforces the 'U.S. vs. Islam' framework that al Qaeda promotes," according to "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counter-Terrorism Communication," produced last month by the center.

(Full Article)

Snop's Commentary:

I've been thinking about this issue for a couple weeks and wondering who really benefits and who doesn't. The simple answer is that the West is put at a disadvantage while Al Qaeda et al benefit.

More specifically, the West loses out because we desperately need a way to conceptualize the enemy. Doing that requires descriptive language. Neutralizing the language neutralizes our ability to think about the enemy. If we can't think about the enemy, we cannot devise plans to defeat the enemy, nor can we communicate how to carryout out such plans if we could think them up in the first place.

Similarly, former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich warned that: " If we cannot have an honest discussion about the nature of the threats against us , we cannot develop strategies to meet those threats"[...] "It is simply suicidal to treat the Al Qaeda network as simply 'an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal' while ignoring the radical religious foundation underpinning this and other groups that constitute an Irreconcilable Wing of Islam."

If the intended effect of adopting this language is to mollify segments of the Islamic world -what is the cost/benefit of doing so with regard to the ideological war? And who is responsible for making this call anyway?

Many questions need to be answered before we throw away what little gains we have made in confronting this already ambiguous threat.

As the monkeys above suggest...if we can't name the threat...we can't speak of the threat...if we can't speak of the threat...no one else will hear and learn of the threat...if no one else can hear and learn of the threat we won't be better off than a bunch of blind monkeys.