A Politically Correct War

[Valin]

Newsweek:

Nine years after 9/11, we still don’t know how to deal with radical Islam.
Michael Hirsh
6/17/10

The Obama administration is deeply concerned with stopping the next Faisal Shahzad—the man who, but for another lesson or two on bomb making, might have blown up Times Square on May 1. But in an administration also eager to ingratiate itself with the Muslim world, how far are Obama and his advisers willing to go to confront the radical Islamism that drives men like Shahzad?

Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Muslim community organizer based in Washington, D.C., fears that political correctness has got the better of this administration, to the point where it seems to be almost dissecting radical Islamism out of existence. “You can’t start at just violence because the trajectory is so dangerous. You need to start at that radicalism. The ideology,” Mirahmadi says. Other critics agree. The Obama team, says Scott Carpenter of the Washington Institute for Near East Peace Policy, “is doing some interesting things on the public diplomacy side [outreach to the Muslim world], and on the counterterrorism side. But in this big fat middle, radicalization, they’re doing zero.”

There continues to be a sense of confusion about the government’s efforts to confront the Islamist ideology that lies at the heart of terrorism—the ideology that makes the messages of a rising generation of English-speaking radical preachers so resonant with disaffected, vulnerable Muslims. As the administration did with its recent National Security Strategy—in which the enemy was identified only as Al Qaeda and any reference to Islamism was left out—the Obama team seems eager to paint the Muslim world as largely blameless for the actions of a few deranged individuals. It is part of Obama’s broader strategy of winning back the affections of the Islamic world. But how can the administration interdict would-be terrorists like Shahzad before they strike while studiously avoiding the Islamism that motivates them?
(Snip)