Have you noticed that Liberals seem to be more concerned with not offending hardcore Muslim practitioners and extremists than going after hardcore Islamists? Oh, and creating strawmen arguments. Over at CNN, John McWhorter writes a whopper of a tale
Should we call it ‘radical Islam’?
Republicans who despise Democrats such as Hillary Clinton for describing America as in a battle against “terrorism” rather than “radical Islam” need to get out of the sandbox. Their charge is, at heart, childish.
The gripe is that Clinton, President Barack Obama and others, in refusing to say we are battling radical Islam, are too caught up in political correctness to even call our enemies by name. The further implication is that our leaders’ reluctance to directly call out our enemies stems from not truly considering them culpable — i.e., believing that the West had it coming.
No. The complainants think that as long as we say “radical Islam” rather than “Islam” alone, we are suitably specifying that we don’t hate Muslims. But that isn’t how it would appear to Muslims themselves, and for understandable reasons.
In a sentence such as “We must eradicate radical Islam,” the object of eradicate is technically “radical Islam,” yes, but the core object, the heart of the expression “radical Islam” is “Islam.” Radical Islam is a kind of Islam. The object of the eradication in the sentence is “Islam,” modified by “radical.”
That affects how one processes such a sentence — the adjective can come off as a kind of decoration. “I’m thinking about one of those juicy steaks” — note how we process the person mainly as thinking about steak, not steaks with the particular quality of being juicy. The “juicy” feels parenthetical.
Got that? The idiocy should leave you shaking your head like the look your dog gives you when it sees your eat the last bite of said steak.
But we need not exoticize them on this. Suppose someone decided to battle “radical Christianity”? Note that whatever the justifications along the lines of “We don’t mean all Christians,” they’d sound a little thin — especially given that in some minds, “radical” suggests authenticity.
Of course, there aren’t hundreds of thousands, if not more, of Christians taking up arms to kill the infidel around the world in the name of The Christ. There aren’t hundreds of millions of Christians pushing for a hardcore version of Christianity which requires stoning adulterous women, forcing women to be 2nd class citizens, not allowing women out of the house without a related man, keeping young females as sex slaves, cutting off limbs for criminal violations, and throwing gays off tall buildings, among others. There aren’t millions of Christians dancing in the streets when a mosque is blown up by a Christian suicide bomber. Christians are pushing for blasphemy laws around the world and at the United Nations. Those are all things from the Religion of Peace. If Muslims don’t like the term “radical Islam”, perhaps they should take their religion back from the extremists. Unfortunately, millions and millions practice some of the extremist viewpoint, but aren’t getting involved with the violent jihadi style.
The best McWhorter can come up with is to call them simply “terrorists”. Because identifying what type they are is super duper mean, and might require radical Muslims to head to their safe spaces.
Not too be outdone, Excitable Charles Blow has trotted out the tired old tripe which conflates any condemnation of radical Islam as being 100% anti-Muslim. This part near the end is cute
As the ACLU has written of these laws:
“Efforts to single out Muslims and to advance the ugly idea that anything Islamic is un-American are unjust and discriminatory and should be rejected. Laws that single out Sharia violate the First Amendment by treating one belief system as suspect.â€
This demonizing a single religious faith is a slippery slope. It feeds something that is at odds with the most noble ambition of this country’s better angels: equality.
If Muslims do not want their religion being demonized (which is not what is happening, as most take great pains to identify the issue with the radicals), then they need to take it back….by the way, when liberals attempt to equate the condemnation of the radicals with condemnation of the whole, aren’t they themselves making a case that all Muslims are radical? As for Sharia law, the UK Telegraph is running an opinion piece advocating for an alternate Islamic caliphate, which has to be read to be believed (Breitbart has a deeper discussion of it), and includes
All pious Muslims well-read in the Hadith (the compiled sayings of the Prophet) firmly believe in the need to establish an Islamic State headed by a Muslim Caliph. This is mentioned twice in the Holy Quran and it’s central to the Islamic faith. No Muslim scholar would debate an Islamic state and the caliphate. Muslim Sunnis claim that the caliph should hail from Meccan notability. Shiite Muslims add that he must be from Ahl al-Bayt; a member of the prophet’s family.
So, essentially, all Muslims want the same final outcome as ISIS? The writer, Sami Moubayed, who is a Syrian historian and former Carnegie scholar, and the author of Under the Black Flag: At the frontier of the New Jihad, is telling us that every Muslim should believe in a worldwide caliphate, they should just want one not run by ISIS. Huh.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Read: Calling Radical Islam Radical Islam Is Super Mean Or Something »
