Friday, February 20, 2015

White House traps itself in terrorism word games

◼ Why has the Obama administration tied itself in knots over what to call Islamic terrorism? We know the president has rejected the term in favor of "violent extremism," ordering his administration not to refer to Islamic terrorists like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as Islamic. "No religion is responsible for terrorism," Obama declared at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism Wednesday. - Byron York/Washington Examiner @ByronYork

And yet in the same speech, Obama uttered the word "Christianity" once, "Judaism" once, "Buddhism" once — and "Islam" or "Muslim" 52 times. If a listener did not know better, he might think there was something Islamic about the extremism that was the subject of the White House conference.

Obama's semantic preferences have left his spokesmen struggling to find words to describe one of the United States' top national security concerns. It's a particular troubling problem now, with the rise of the Islamic State, but it has deep roots; the president has long appeared conflicted on how to refer to Islamic terrorism....

White House spokesman Josh Earnest fell into a variety of holes Wednesday as he tried to navigate the president's vocabulary requirements. For example, a reporter noted that Obama and top administration officials "have gone to great lengths to not say that it's a summit about Islamic extremism … but if you look at the groups that are participating, most of them … are related in one way or another to the Muslim community. How do you square the message with the participants?"

...Earnest's contortions left some listeners baffled. "You just won't call it militant Islam or anything like that?" asked a reporter. "Well, I think we’ve been very clear about what we call it," Earnest replied.

Later, another reporter asked about a statement Earnest released last weekend condemning the Islamic State's beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians. The statement referred to the victims as "Egyptian citizens," rather than "Egyptian Christians." Why was that?

Earnest quickly conceded the victims were killed not just because they were Egyptian "but also because they were Christian." When asked why he didn't just say that last weekend, Earnest answered, "I can't account for that specific line in the statement." The statement, of course, was his own.

Still later, yet another reporter asked about a comment from State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, who during a TV interview Wednesday discussed the Lord's Resistance Army in Africa. "That's a Christian militant group," Harf said, correctly. The question for Earnest was: Why does the administration refer to a Christian militant group as Christian when it won't refer to an Islamic militant group as Islamic?

"Well, I did not see my colleague's comments on this topic," Earnest said, "so I don't want to sort of weigh in and try to explain what she meant."





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