Joseph Myers, c/o Instapundit:
Words matter, and in the global war on terror we are losing the battle of words, in a self-inflicted defeat. The consequences could not be more profound.
Recent government policy memoranda, circulating through the national counter-terrorism and diplomatic community, establishes a new “speech code” for the lexicon in the war on terror, as reported by the Associated Press and now available in the public domain .
These new “speech codes” recommended that analysts and policy makers avoid the terms jihad or jihadist or mujhadid or “al-Qaida movement” and replace them with “extremists” and by extension other non-specific terms.
All part and parcel of the anatomy of surrender, I suppose.
At the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, a very illuminating, must-read piece by Bruce Bawer regarding the West’s crippling reluctance to name and confront its Jihadist enemy. Others have written on this topic, but I don’t think I’ve yet seen a more comprehensive view of the problem and its many facets articulated so clearly, with reference to the many awful events of recent memory that underscore Bawer’s point.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war — holy war, jihad — to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular — the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed — have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology — which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive — people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis — infidels living in Muslim societies.
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After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash” — thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones.
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So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”
By all means, do read the whole thing. Thanks to Instapundit for providing the link that brought Bawer’s article to my attention.
Flemming Rose, culture editor for the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper that drew the ire of Jihadists by publishing the infamous Mohammed cartoons, responds to Osama Bin Laden’s latest threat:
What kind of civilization are we, after all, if we refrain from mocking and ridiculing bin Laden and his followers?
I’ve said so myself before.
Glenn aptly answers Rose’s question:
A pretty sorry one. Which, I fear, would suit some people fine.
Sadly so.
On Reuters a couple of days ago: “Clinton attacks Obama and McCain on Iraq”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton put the war in Iraq in the forefront of her campaign on Monday, attacking Democratic rival Barack Obama and Republican John McCain over an issue that has divided the country.
Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, laid out her policy proposals to deal with the conflict, including ensuring that troops have sufficient rest time between deployments, pressing the United Nations to be more involved, and getting key allies to help stabilize the region.
“Bringing our troops home safely will take a president who is ready to be commander in chief on Day One,” she said in a speech.
“Withdrawal is not defeat. Defeat is keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years.”
Oh! Well, if it’s going to take that long to defeat our fanatical Jihadist enemies, then forget it I guess. It’s hardly worth the trouble.
Seems worthy of concern to me that she who aspires to be our military’s commander-in-chief shows no qualms about demonstrating the United States to be the very “paper tiger” or “weak horse” that Osama Bin Laden counted on us to be. Is she just shrewdly pandering to the anti-war component of her voter base, or does she really and truly not see any serious long-term consequences to allowing the United States to be perceived as weak-willed and lacking in resolve? Furthermore, I don’t see how in March 2008 one can make such a gloomy prediction about Iraq’s future and expect to be taken as fully serious, given the significant progress that our shift in strategy has brought. Seems like there’s an ever-growing disconnect between the politically convenient “the Iraq war is a failure” narrative and improving realities on the ground.
I’ve found myself reading and bookmarking a number of noteworthy articles this past week. Lots of interesting stuff to comment on here, but for fear I might not find the time to do so at any length very soon, I’m going to catch up by posting some quick quotes and links…
First up: Writer/director/producer David Mamet wrote an exceptional article in the Village Voice, in which he explains his shift away from the left. Interestingly, he attributes his own change in thinking to an inability to reconcile long-held beliefs with the more favorable evidence offered by his everyday experiences.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances — that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired — in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
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And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations” — the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations — they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
It sounds to me like he’s simply become more pragmatic. Brings to mind neo-neocon’s excellent and insighful “A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change” series.
Elsewhere in the article, Mamet included a mention of NPR that I found amusing and relevant, as my own wife is an NPR fan of many years but I’ve come to find the station’s reporting biases frustrating. Mamet begins:
We were riding along and listening to NPR.
(Typical scene for me and my wife too, during our morning commute.)
I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been — rather charmingly, I thought — referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
Funny, I’ve come to refer to it in my own mind with a chuckle as “Nationalized People’s Radio” … Mamet and I must be thinking on similar wavelengths…
(Update 3/19: “National Progressive Radio” is another variant I’ve since caught myself using)
In other news: George McGovern seems to get it more than either of our current Democratic presidential candidates when it comes to economic freedom, as Glenn Reynolds noted at Instapundit. Why, as Glenn rightly asked, isn’t he running for president?
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
The last remaining staircase at the World Trade Center site was moved on Monday. Fittingly, it sounds like it’s going to be preserved as part of the World Trade Center 9/11 memorial.
Charlie Martin puts his finger on something that’s been troubling me about the healthcare debate for a long while: What many people think of as health “insurance” isn’t actually insurance.
IraqPundit genuinely wonders what Obama thinks about U.S. involvement in Iraq, and provides an instructive recap of Obama’s position statements over time. Therein lay some interesting surprises for me, including this quote from a Boston Globe report:
In July of 2004, the day after his speech at the Democratic convention catapulted him into the national spotlight, Barack Obama told a group of reporters in Boston that the United States had an ‘absolute obligation’ to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success.
‘The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,’ he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. ‘It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died… . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.’
He might actually have had a chance at my vote, had he continued with this kind of talk. But lately he seems disinterested in talking about anything but his 2002 advocacy against the Iraq invasion, and in discussing any Iraq policy or strategy short of an immediate withdrawal — an act of retreat and defeat that our enemies would not soon forget, and that would surely come back to haunt us in future conflicts.
Also, at Hot Air: Does the media’s anti-war rhetoric embolden Iraqi insurgents? (Thanks again Instapundit.)
At the Wall Street Journal: What is it about Democrats and Chávez?
And at phi beta cons: Is “postmodern belief in the futility of life” helping drive some to become campus killers? (Hat tip: Instapundit)
