Islamology 101

[Valin]

NRO:

 

We ignore Islamist ideology at our own peril.

Clifford D. May

12/6/12

 

Google “Islamist” and you’ll get more than 24 million hits. Google “jihadist” and you’ll get millions more. Yet I bet the average American could not tell you what it is that Islamists and jihadists believe. And those at the highest levels of the U.S. government refuse to do so.

 

Why? John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House, argues that it is “counterproductive” to describe America’s “enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” To describe terrorists using “religious terms,” he adds, would “play into the false perception” that the “murderers” waging unconventional war against the West are doing so in the name of a “holy cause.”

 

(Snip)

 

Brennan and other American and European officials are wrong, Tibi says, to fear that “fighting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy.” As for the Obama administration’s insistence that “the enemy is specifically, and only, al-Qaeda,” that, Tibi writes, “is far too reductive.”

 

(Snip)

[SrWoodchuck]

Pieces Be Upon Them.

[SrWoodchuck]

Islamists? Jihadists? Children. Evil.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtlF2NsWi1Q&feature=player_embedded

H/T:WeaselZippers