Calling Terrorism By Its Name

I don’t see why this isn’t a bigger issue in the campaign. Certainly, it’s worth an ad or two.

Even if you think it’s nothing but a footnote to Obama’s abject refusal to call Islamic terrorism by its name, it surely matters to the families involved. And if offers a clear image of Obama's dereliction in the matter of Islamic terror.

At issue are Purple Hearts, the medals that are awarded to soldiers injured in combat.

It feels insulting to ask the question, but it has become an issue: Should America reward Purple Hearts to the victims of the Fort Hood massacre?

When Major Nidal Hasan opened fire, he declared himself a warrior for Islam. It makes sense to see his act as an act of war.

To everyone but the Obama administration. It declared his action "workplace violence" and refused to award Purple Hearts.

Congress felt obliged to step in and add the proper Purple Heart citations to the Defense Appropriations Act.

When they did, Obama was sorely offended. He declared that if they were not removed he would veto the entire bill.

Amazing, appalling, unconscionable, but true.

Caroline Glick has the story:

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledged that the attack was a terrorist attack. The Defense Department has insisted on covering up the nature of the attack. The reports it released following the attack failed to mention Hasan's Islamic motivations. Still today the Defense Department insists on defining the massacre as a case of "workplace violence."

To advance this fiction, the Defense Department has refused to award Purple Hearts to the families of the soldiers murdered by Hasan, or to those who were wounded in his attack. It has refused to compensate the families of those murdered or the survivors who were incapacitated at the level the US military compensates the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty and soldiers wounded by enemy fire. 

This year Congress tried to rectify this obscenity by including Purple Heart citations for Ft. Hood casualties in the Defense Appropriations Act.

Obama said he would veto the bill, (and thus deny the military funding), if they didn't remove the clause about the medals. That is how far Obama is willing to go to keep up this fiction, cover up the existence of enemy forces within the US military, deny the threat posed to the US by radical Islam, and in the process, punish and dishonor American soldiers who were killed in the line of duty in an act of war against the US by a self-proclaimed "Soldier of Allah."

That’s not even the end of the story.

In another column Glick explains that the Obama administration has been policing the thought of military instructors, ensuring that none of them speak ill of Islam.

Glick explains the meaning. An administration that cannot see  Islamic terrorism for what it is ends us blaming the problems in the Muslim world on America and Israel.

It is no accident that radical Islam is rising in the Middle East. It correlates with the Obama administration’s failure to call things by their proper names.

In Glick’s words:

That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.

What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government's lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.

"Jihad," "Islamist," "radical Islam," "Islamic terrorism" and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.

The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called "Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism."

According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He "portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way." Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.

In Obama’s military Islam is purged of all negative references. By extension, Islamists are purged of all responsibility for their acts of terror.

The fault, dear readers, lies with a movie that appeared on Youtube.