One must really hand it to President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron for their anti-ISIS speeches at the U.N. on Wednesday: They managed to condemn ISIS, or the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, without much uttering the words “Islam” and “Muslim.”
Not once did Cameron in his UN speech mention “Islam,” but rather “Islamist extremism,” surely a redundancy in terms. He did, however, utter “Muslims” or “Muslim” five times. The rest of his speech stressed that other Muslims were also being killed by the “extremists” and, echoing George W. Bush from nearly a decade and a half ago, indicated that ISIS had “hijacked” Islam, thus exonerating Islam. He mentioned “evil” once, at the end of his speech.
Did Hitler “hijack” Nazism? Did Stalin “hijack” Communism? Did Ruhollah Khomeini “hijack” Islam?
Obama mentioned “evil” once, also, and uttered “Islam” four times. From him we heard the usual puffery about Islam being benign and peaceful and the cornerstone of Western civilization, and repeated his assurances (to Muslims) that we are not at war with Islam. It’s a statement he made in Cairo and in Ankara, Turkey (“In Ankara, I made clear that America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam. “) It’s an “extremist ideology” that has declared war on the West, it’s the “violent extremists” who are responsible for the thousands of deaths and the carnage, not Islam itself, implying that Islam is just a hapless spectator to horrific crimes, and not the perpetrator of them.
Obama will not acknowledge that Islam is nothing if not “extremist” or “radical” or “violent.” However: Islam is as Islam does. That is the immutable fact which Obama and his ilk disguise in their patter of dhimmitude, multiculturalism, and moral relativism.
One can even pronounce a proscribed word and not mean that it has any connection to reality or the word’s actual meaning. Obama has made a rhetorical career of it.
Obama will throw a tantrum and berate his military advisors if they try to “paint all of Islam with the same brush.” That is, as a conquering, murdering, raping, looting ideology, as ISIS is and does. If the future indeed does not belong to those who “slander” the prophet of Islam – that is, identify Mohammad as the conquering, murdering, raping, looter he was, provided he actually existed – then the West is cooked per halal style, with our throats cut with knives or machetes we handed to our executioners , our property looted, our womenfolk sold off as sex slaves and concubines, and our children enrolled in politically correct madrassas.
Denial, willful ignorance, wishful thinking: the hallmarks of our age. If you know the truth about ISIS and Islam, as Obama does, and deny the truth, that is to side with Islam and ISIS. Cameron is merely a knee-knocking fool, whose middle name must be ostrich.
Everyone but a semi-literate dolt reading the British press knows that the term “Asian,” when it occurs in a story about the Pakistani grooming gangs or an attack on white Britons, stands for the prohibited and unmentionable term “Muslim.” But it isn’t only careless usage of the term “Muslim” which could incur judicial disapprobation, jail time, and financial and personal penalties, but the wrath of Muslims over their “outraged religious feelings” or the alleged imputation of their ethnicity, as though mentioning a criminal’s Islamic affiliation was tantamount to expressing one’s “racism.”
Euphemisms, except in certain, defined circumstances (such as in dramatic dialogue, or in lyrics or poetry, or in humor), are corruptors of language and of minds. Euphemisms are not metaphors or similes for anything. Their purpose is to disguise facts, not serve as guides to facts or as a means of clarification. Their primary purpose is to help a mind evade perceiving and dealing with reality. A euphemism used in dramatic dialogue can be justified if it stresses a disguised fact; but there is no justification for employing a euphemism when dealing with reality.
