Denying the Real Motivation for Islamist Terrorism (Washington Times)
February 8, 2015
By Brooke Goldstein
Islamists are winning their war to silence critical commentary in the West about Islam. So says Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which originally published the now-infamous images of Muhammad, in his recent book, “The Tyranny of Silence.”
Whether motivated by a cowardly nature or by an obsequious desire to be nice, much of the media and the Obama administration now adhere to a common vocabulary when discussing violence motivated by Islamist theology. There is simply no reference to the theological motivations so relevant to the perpetrators of religiously inspired terror.
We are told that The Islamic State is not Islamic (rather a terrorist “jayvee team”), the Taliban is not an Islamist terrorist group (rather an “insurgency”), the Charlie Hebdo massacres were not coordinated by radical Islamists (rather “individual terrorists”), the Fort Hood murders were not acts of terror (rather “workplace violence”), the terrorist attack on our embassy in Libya was not instigated by imams preaching Islamic blasphemy laws (rather by our own exercise of free speech) and so on.