No Bark, No Bite
To anybody who missed it, President Obama convened another talking-shop in Washington this week. Events in Iraq, Syria, Libya, France, Denmark and elsewhere have not after all escaped the President’s notice. And so he decided to put together a conference to discuss ‘Countering Violent Extremism’.
This term itself is, it should be embarrassingly admitted from the start, a piece of imported British circumlocution. It was the Labour government in Britain post-2005 that came up with the definition of Jihadist terrorism as ‘violent extremism.’ The thought was that it was both important to de-couple ‘Islam’ from ‘terrorism’ and at the same time give off the message that anybody – of any religion or none – could potentially turn into a ‘violent extremist’.
Naturally there were whole piles of failure in this concept – both in its thinking, implementation and results. But it started from the problem that the thought was faulty. All governments, including the British Labour government, which implemented it first – also know and have stated that our primary security threat comes from Islamist-inspired terrorism. But another problem was that it didn’t work. The terrorism problem did not improve. Terrorists did not put down their weapons and stop plotting in appreciation of the linguistic subtleties of British law-makers.
There is something fiddling in the whole term and in the whole approach – an approach, incidentally, which Britain has been stepping away from even as America has been taking it up.
But there is a mistake happening on all sides here. Critics of the President are overwhelmingly focusing on his unwillingness to even name the enemy he is aspiring to tackle. But the larger problem to come out of President’s Obama’s summit is not the failure of language but the failure of action. If President Obama were intent on degrading ISIS and had a plan to do so then many of his critics would allow him to call ISIS whatever he wanted. If he had a policy to prevent Libya, on the southern shores of Europe, from turning that country into yet another country where people can be beheaded on camera purely because of their religious affiliation then the linguistic gymnastics might be forgiven. But he appears to have a plan for none of these things.
It is an embarrassment that the President of the United States cannot name civilization’s enemy. But what is a catastrophe is that other than holding endless colloquiums, he appears to have absolutely no plan to defeat them.
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