theatlantic | Why does this matter? Because the U.S. government has
finite resources. If you assume, as conservatives tend to, that the only
significant terrorist threat America faces comes from people with names
like Mohammed and Ibrahim, then that’s where you’ll devote your time
and money. If, on the other hand, you recognize that environmental
lunatics and right-wing militia types kill Americans for political
reasons too, you’ll spread the money around.
We’ve already seen the consequences of a disproportionate focus on jihadist terrorism. After 9/11, the Bush administration so dramatically shifted
homeland-security resources toward stopping al-Qaeda that it left FEMA
hideously unprepared to deal with an attack from Mother Nature, in the
form of Hurricane Katrina. The Obama administration is wise to avoid
that kind of overly narrow focus today. Of course it’s important to stop
the next Nidal Malik Hasan or Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev. But it’s also important to stop the next Timothy McVeigh or
Wade Michael Page. And by calling the threat “violent extremism” rather
than “radical Islam,” Obama tells the bureaucracy to work on that too.
Obama, after all, faces two overlapping but distinct
challenges. One is an ideology: the totalitarian, even genocidal, vision
espoused by ISIS. The second is a tactic: terrorism, which is available
to people of all ideological stripes and which grows more dangerous as
technology empowers individuals or groups to kill far more people far
more quickly than they could have in ages past.
Instead of assuming that these threats are the same,
we should be debating the relative danger of each. By using “violent
extremism” rather than “radical Islam,” Obama is staking out a position
in that argument. It’s a position with which reasonable people can
disagree. But cowardice has nothing to do with it.
