Obama’s war on the language of terror

Putting aside that President Obama has not in fact made goodwill headway in Muslim countries, I understand and agree with the impulse to avoid sullying Islam, painting it across the board with the brush of its radical Islamists.  But this Administration’s language game is the quintessential head in the sand.  It is as though European appeasers in the 1930s sought to avoid calling Nazis what they were, for fear of unnecessary offense to ordinary Germans (who elected Hitler).  Oh wait, that’s exactly what happened.

Our hyper-solicitude for Muslim sensitivities actually works against ordinary Muslim courage.  There is no shortage of Muslim courage — witness the uprising in Iran last year, and this Administration’s embarrassingly tepid response.  If even our leaders are unwilling to call the oppression of Islamofascism what it is, then courageous Muslims are hopeless heroes, and there will be fewer and fewer of them.  In short, we’re manifesting contempt for the best actual human beings who are Muslims in our misdirected determination to be sensitive to abstract Muslims.

Moreover, semantic manipulation typically backfires, especially in democracies, where the state does not control all, or even many, information sources.  If a government of the people refuses to call a thing by the name its people fairly use — like “Islamic terrorism” — then the people come to distrust their government.  What is the government hiding?  What is the government’s real agenda?  These questions arise only because the government in the first instance distrusts the intelligence of its own people and resolves to uplift them by stripping their language of common phrases.

This Administration’s premise — that one way to fight Islamic terrorists is to go silent on the very phrase “Islamic terrorists” lest we offend Muslims — contradicts one of the greatest principles of American constitutional jurisprudence.

In his 1927 Whitney v. California opinion, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “if there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

In other words, the remedy is not to strip our language of common phrases we use to describe our actual enemies, but to use the common phrases appropriately and to resolve to commend Muslim courage wherever it arises to resist oppression, to celebrate the many beauties of Muslim culture, and to lend American support to the peaceful aspirations of millions of Muslims.

In short, don’t enforce a shorter dictionary; use more speech to achieve our twin aims of battling Islamic terrorism and declaring our solidarity with courageous and peace-loving Muslims everywhere.

Kendrick Macdowell is a lawyer and writer in Washington DC.  He was Vice President and General Counsel at the National Association of Theatre Owners.  Prior to joining NATO, he served as General Counsel to Senator Peter Fitzgerald and specialized in judiciary and financial market issues.  Prior to the Senate, he was a partner at the law firm of Patton Boggs LLP.