The announcement by the Associated Press that it would no longer allow its writers to use the words “Islamist” and “Islamism” provides a teachable moment for the audience of the legacy media, and those parts of the media that are not yet fully PC. The decision is an indication that the venerable wire service intends to do its part to make the world safe for sharia.
It’s important to remember that the use of the word “Islamist” was itself an attempt to satisfy the dictates of Political Correctness. That is, “Islamist” was already a euphemism. Back in the early days of the “War on Terror” — when President George W. Bush set what eventually became the standards for media and government sensitivity — the term “Islamism” was introduced to distinguish the elusive “moderate Muslim” from people who commit murderous acts of the utmost brutality in the name of Allah. Such niceties of vocabulary were required by CAIR and similar organizations that lobby on the half of American Muslims. To a hardened cynic (or a realist, depending on your taste), this was a clear attempt to obfuscate the connection between the core theological doctrines of Islam and the violent jihad that is waged continuously across the globe wherever Muslims may be found.
But PC/MC won the day, and “Islamist” became standard usage in government pronouncements and the media, and even among many conservatives who wished to prosecute the War on Terror vigorously, but were earnest in their desire to avoid alienating “moderate” Muslims.
This and other aspects of voluntary self-muzzling by the media were intended to exclude acknowledgement of Islamic violence from their coverage of world events. The result was like a censored wartime newspaper, with blacked-out sections where “sensitive” information has been redacted. However, a word like “Islamist” is less than sufficiently opaque for those purposes. The word “Islam” is, after all, embedded in the euphemism, permitting the association of deadly violence with Islam to percolate through the blackout and enter even the dullest reader’s mind.
The steady subliminal drumbeat of Islam… Islam… Islam… thus managed to pass through the PC membrane and into the consciousness of attentive readers. This result, needless to say, was untenable from the perspective of CAIR, which lobbied vigorously against it. The problem was rectified first by the United States government, which forbade the usage of “Islam”, “Muslim”, “Jihad”, or any other term that might in any way associate acts of violence with Islam. In effect, the Associated Press is just now catching up with the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Executive Branch of the federal government.
So we are now reduced to… what? What will we say instead of “Islamism”? The well-meaning people who coined the word intended it to convey the sense that violent criminals had “perverted” the doctrines of Islam into a violent ideology, and were thus not “true Muslims”. How does an honest, diligent reporter convey the same meaning without providing a lengthy description, like the one I just gave?
Answer: he doesn’t.
He is limited to terms such as “violent extremist” — the phrase now preferred by the United States government — or some other similar elision that avoids mentioning the Religion of Peace. He is allowed to use “Al Qaeda”, “Hezbollah”, “Hamas” (as it happens, a local franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR’s parent organization), and other groups designated as violent terrorist outfits by Western governments.
Yet he and the media companies that publish his reports are required to go through ever-greater contortions to avoid associating Islam with “violent extremists” who commit terrorist acts. If he includes excerpts from the suicide bomber’s martyrdom video, he will inevitably propagate ecstatic declarations of love for Allah and Mohammed in association with the desire to kill innocent people. If he includes quotes from the leader of the “violent extremists”, he will be featuring suras quoted from the Koran and yet more declarations of devotion to Allah.
News outlets are thus reduced to showing — without additional explanation — corpses lying in the street, burning buildings and cars, rubble, weeping women, bleeding children, and other signs that Islamic jihad has been at work. If they are to obey fully the requirements of CAIR, they must not air any explanations of these acts by the perpetrators or their supporters.
This is the dilemma for our media. If they are to cover in full the horrendous events that unfold every day in areas where Muslims are active and fervent, they are inexorably driven to display the reasons why active and fervent Muslims commit these acts. It’s inherently very difficult for them to report such news without allowing some leakage of the true story behind all the carnage and destruction.
This is why we should welcome the decision by the Associated Press to further reduce the vocabulary with which they may describe events that make the news. Without being able to employ the convenient shorthand “Islamist”, they’ll be forced either to omit the story entirely — which they hate to do, since “if it bleeds, it leads” — or they will have to prepare a lengthy description of the “militants” and their motives for committing all these murderous acts.
So what will they do? Keep an eye on future AP articles. The next few months should be interesting.
The AP also changed their style book to forbid the term “illegal immigrants.”
The other night Jay Leno suggested that they replace it with “undocumented democrats.”
Back to calling it Mohammadenism then?
“Keep an eye on future AP articles. The next few months should be interesting.”
I would qualify that as being guaranteed to be depressing.
Keep your eyes on what Barry Soetoro does as well as what he says. Barry is destroying America from within.
He has suborned the judicial system (Eric Holder).
He has suborned the CIA (John Brennan). Brennan is fast-paced to denude America of nuclear defense capability.
The FBI is compromised (The Muslim Brotherhood is dictating how the US examines Muslim fifth coloumnist infiltrators within its borders).
The White House entertains Black Panthers and MB has constant access to the first Muslim President of the United States. “The future should not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” sayeth the President of the United States around the time he bent over and kissed the sitting hand of the King of Saudi Arabia.
Killery Clinton (Architect of the OIC sponsored UN proposal to criminalize blasphemy of Religion (read Islam) and advised by Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate Huma Abedin)) has been replaced by the dumbest coward retrograde in American history, John Kerry.
I’m not American, but I care greatly about America. America is the greatest experiment in human freedom. You Americans, through apathy are enabling the dismemberment of Human Freedom. Stand up. Take action. Surely, there are legal mechanisms to bring down this usurper of freedom. Max.
Like I said, the most obvious replacement for Islamist is “Practitioner of Islam,”
for Islamism,”The Practice of Islam.”
The attempted mind-control won’t work, since it was mind control censoring in the first place. The term Islamist and Islamism is polite and submissive. Yeah, the mind control minions think they can shape our behavior. Rank amateurs.
The terms Practitioner of Islam and Practice of Islam are accurate and eloquent and help to focus on just what it is that that Muslims think and do.
GWH Bush is also famous for: “Islam is a religion of peace” quip.
Which is of course the lie of the century.
Amazing! Does “perpetuated by those of the Islamic faith” pass muster by the censors?
Perpetrators of “Man made disasters” is a sterile version of what they can call it.
Sounds like what our President did after Benghazi. Anything to deflect attention away from the real concept. He got away with it, I expect the MSM to also get away with calling Islamic nationalism anything except Islamic.
Just refer to them all as muslims; it’s factual and it’s accurate.
Sky news has this report from Afghanistan:
“Taliban militants have killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, in the deadliest day in Afghanistan for the US in eight months.
Three members of the military, two US civilians and an Afghan doctor died after being hit by an explosion while travelling to donate books to a school in the south.”
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There you go. “Militants” is correct usage. And Taliban militants are the party in power at the moment, at least in the countryside. But the Muslim Pacificants are calling for peace and calm. No, I don’t see any of them either, but that doesn’t mean Muslim peacemakers don’t exist. I’ll bet they live in the attics of Muslim moderates and are vegans. They pass the time making little hygienic cloths to pass around after suicide bombers have been in the ‘hood. These are for wiping off any spittle that flies in your general direction. They also craft umbrellas specially reinforced to ward off the elements in terrorist-infested countries. Since it only ever rains random falling body parts in parched Muslim terrorist hell-holes, these cleverly designed umbrellas are de rigueur for tourist travel in these places.
SecState Kerry is proving to be an adept hand-wringer over this purported “tragedy”. How can this all-too-common mode of attack by Muslim terrorists be a tragedy when it’s business as usual? Blowing people up is what Muslim terrorists *do*; expecting a different outcome is insane thinking or pathological lying. That young State Dept employee was foolish to leave the compound, though not quite as foolish as she was to end up in Terrorstan in the first place.
But we’ve long since learned that Muslim terrorism and its fellow travelers are both forms of group insanity. They raise their kids to be killers, making sure daily life is so awful that group death looks like a better choice. Progressives raise their children to believe that going to terrorist-ridden hellholes is a good career move.
I’m sure someone else must have come up with “Mosque-itoes” long before me, but just in case…
George Orwell would be feeling ambivalent about this: on one hand taking a perverse pride in the fact he had predicted this politically-driven debasement and distortion of language more than half a century ago; on the other, overwhelming disgust that it had come to pass.
Regrettably, Baron, you are incorrect in this:
“This is why we should welcome the decision by the Associated Press to further reduce the vocabulary with which they may describe events that make the news. Without being able to employ the convenient shorthand “Islamist”, they’ll be forced either to omit the story entirely — which they hate to do, since “if it bleeds, it leads” — or they will have to prepare a lengthy description of the “militants” and their motives for committing all these murderous acts.”
for the simple reason that the media do not have to describe the motives. In the Australian media the reportage that I casually encountered on the Mumbai bombings left one mystified. Islam/Muslims/Islamism/Islamicist were not mentioned. I surmised they were Islamic terror attacks, but also puzzled: could it possibly be some kind of massive internal infighting by organised crime factions. Then I spotted something which noted that a Lubavitcher “Chabad” house had been targeted with the rabbi and his pregnant wife (and another young child) murdered, my surmising firmed up. Then Mark Steyn reported on the widespread omission in the MSM of the Mumbai bombings being attributed to Islam and noted that something like a quarter of this day’s terrorist campaign’s resources were devoted to targeting this single Jewish family of mum, dad and two kids (one was whisked away by a quick-thinking Hindu domestic servant).
So AP, one half of the world’s “wire service” duopoly, will now be regularly serving up news of atrocities with the instigators unidentified and their motives unexplained. Fabulous.
“Undocumented Muslims”?
“Purveyors of workplace violence”?