Obama's terror talk

President Obama has always been particular about the language he uses to describe jihadists. He renamed President Bush’s “Global War on Terror” the “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Granted, military officials objected to the old terminology because it magnified the threat of our adversaries and overstated their unity. But the new term was obviously designed to cloud what we were doing. This is the complaint against Obama’s refusal to recognize the connection between Islam and most global terrorism today.

At the beginning of his administration, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was asked why she did not use the word “terrorism” in her testimony before Congress. She said she preferred “man-caused disasters” because “it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” This was justly ridiculed.

The president himself has drawn ridicule for refusing to identify the religion behind the terror network that has occupied most of our national security attention since 2001. He refers to “violent extremism” instead of radical Islam. At his White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, Islam went entirely unmentioned. “No religion is responsible for terrorism,” Obama forcefully declared.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell put us on guard against the intentionally deceptive use of political speech. Political leaders employ euphemisms and “sheer cloudy vagueness,” as Orwell called it, to conceal what they are saying even as they say it, to indicate something while distracting from it. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote.

Obama caused outrage when he called the shooting at the kosher deli in Paris a “random” killing of “a bunch of folks,” whereas the killer himself said he “targeted them because they were Jewish.” When ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya, Obama lamented the killing of “Egyptian citizens,” avoiding reference to the killers labeling the victims as “the people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.”

The religious element in the al-Qaeda conflict is admittedly awkward. It invites the appearance of being “at war with Islam” and tempts people at home to think ill of their Muslim neighbors or generalize about Muslims worldwide. Sensitivity to these matters prompted President Bush to rally the country to a “War on Terror” instead of to what it is: a war with Islamic jihadism. Charles Krauthammer mocked it, comparing it to America responding to Pearl Harbor with a “War on Sneak Attacks.” Donald Rumsfeld himself, Bush’s defense secretary, supported the term “global struggle against violent extremism.” So the obfuscation has been bipartisan.

There is a time for the artful use of diplomatic language to address a delicate situation. But when an awkward truth becomes an elephant in the room, a wise leader addresses it squarely rather than continuing to veil it in the vain hope of persuading people to deny the evidence of their own eyes, and in so doing undermining his broader capacity for leadership.