NYTimes | President Obama stands accused of political correctness for his unwillingness to accuse groups such as the Islamic State of “Islamic extremism,” choosing a more generic term, “violent extremism.”
His critics say that you cannot fight an enemy you will not name. Even
his supporters feel that his approach is too “professorial.”
But far from being a scholar concerned with describing the phenomenon accurately, the president is deliberately choosing not to emphasize the Islamic State’s religious dimension for political and strategic reasons.
After all, what would be the practical consequence of describing the
group, also known as ISIS, as Islamic? Would the West drop more bombs on
it? Send in more soldiers to fight it? No, but it would make many
Muslims feel that their religion had been unfairly maligned. And it
would dishearten Muslim leaders who have continually denounced the
Islamic State as a group that does not represent Islam.
But “the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” Graeme Wood writes in a much-discussed cover essay for the Atlantic this month.Wood is much taken by the Princeton academic Bernard Haykel,
who says that people want to turn a blind eye to the Islamic State’s
ideology for political reasons. “People want to absolve Islam,” he
quotes Haykel as saying. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’
mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do.”
Right. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and perhaps 30,000 members of the Islamic State.
And yet Haykel feels that it is what the 0.0019 percent of Muslims do
that defines the religion. Who is being political, I wonder?
