Republican presidential candidates have a favorite talking point — that President Obama won’t use the precise phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” even though he describes the problem in similar terms. Thus, the complaint is ridiculous and even a bit dangerous, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
One of the more inane memes in current rhetoric in the United States about terrorism is that President Obama supposedly isn’t recognizing terrorist threats for what they are because he does not utter a certain phrase in talking about them.
In an interview this week, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed the President’s recent address to the nation about terrorism because he did not use the label “radical Islamic terrorism.” Retired Army General Michael Flynn, who even when on active duty liked to tell how everyone else is screwing up except himself, used an extended version of the meme in the course of promoting a book he is co-writing with neocon ideologue Michael Ledeen.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president.
(Ledeen is the source of the eponymous doctrine according to which “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”)
Flynn says they are writing the book to show that “war is being waged against us by enemies this administration has forbidden us to describe: radical Islamists.”
Such rhetoric totally disregards what the incumbent president, and others in his administration, actually have been saying. No one is forbidding any accurate descriptions of terrorist threats, and no one is shying away from making clear that the principal current threats are radicals who commit terrorism in the name of Islam.
In that same presidential address, Mr. Obama spoke of how there is no “denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities.” He pointed this out in the course of making the further point that Muslim leaders around the world must “decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology” that has developed within their religious community and in…