Why President Obama doesn't say "radical Islamic"

President Barack Obama and presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton avoid using the phrase "radical Islamic" in speaking of terrorists.  Some Republican candidates and conservative pundits try to portray that as a sign of weakness in the fight against ISIS.

Both Donald Trump and Chris Christie derided Obama's lack of using the term, claiming that it is "political correctness," and implying that not using that term somehow means we are not fully engaged in the kind of war they think we should be fighting.

But it was a Republican president, George W. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 who -- to his great credit -- spoke boldly to the nation, saying that "We are not at war with Islam."

In a New York Times Magazine article on 12/20/15, Emily Bazelon wrote that many Muslim's themselves reject the term "radical Islam."   She continues:  "They say that ISIS's reading of the Quran and other texts is so selective as to be unrecognizable as Muslim at all."

Bazelon quotes John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguist, as dismissing the president's critics on this as "childish," given the way it would be heard and distorted by anti-Muslim groups.    He explains that, when one hears a sentence like "We must eradicate radical Islam," people don't hear that as saying there is a radical fringe group who claim to be Islamic that must be defeated because of their radical violence.   One tends to hear "We must eradicate Islam."

McWhorter continues:
"The terms 'radical Christian' and 'radical Jew'  have little purchase, not because there aren't people who commit violence in the name of Christianity or Judaism but because they don't loom large in the public consciousness and threaten to swallow a religion's whole identity."

The man who killed three people at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic was described by his own wife as an "extremely evangelical Christian";   and the man who killed Kansas abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, testified that his Christian faith  and his views about abortion went "hand in hand."    Yet there has been little written about "radical Christianity" being the culprit in the abortion debate.

As Bazelon concludes, "We assume that these men are outliers -- not exemplars."    Why can we not do the same for the billion Muslims who do not endorse violence?    I would like to think that this difference is a matter of ignorance on the part of most Westerners about the Muslim faith and the Muslim people.    But I'm afraid it's much more complex than that, and it has much more to do with a general fear and distrust of "the other" -- distressingly encouraged and exploited by the rhetoric of most Republican presidential candidates and the right wing media.

Ralph