From the Middle East Forum:The Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all words that allude to Islam from important national security documents. Put differently, the Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all knowledge and context necessary to confront and defeat radical Islam (news much welcomed by Islamist organizations like CAIR). While this move may reflect a naively therapeutic administration — an Obama advisor once suggested that Winnie the Pooh should inform U.S foreign policy — that Obama, the one U.S. president who best knows that politically correct niceties will have no effect on the Muslim world is enforcing this ban, is further troubling.

An Associated Press report has the disturbing details:

President Barack Obama’s advisers plan to remove terms such as “Islamic radicalism” from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counterterrorism officials say.

First off, how, exactly, does the use of terms such as “Islamic radicalism” indicate that the U.S. views “Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism”? It is the height of oversensitivity to think that the so-called “Muslim street” can be antagonized by accurate words in technical U.S. documents — documents they don’t know or care about — especially since the Arabic media itself often employs such terms. Surely we can use “Islamic radicalism” to define, well, Islamic radicals, without simultaneously viewing all Muslims “through the lens of terrorism”? Just as surely as we can use words like “Nazism” to define white supremacists, without viewing all white nations through the lens of racism?

The AP report continues:

Obama’s speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist China in 1984, Reagan spoke at Fudan University in Shanghai about education, space exploration and scientific research. He discussed freedom and liberty. He never mentioned communism or democracy.

The analogy is flawed. For starters, in Reagan’s era, the Soviet Union, not China, was America’s prime antagonist — just as today, Islamic radicals, not Muslims, are America’s prime enemy. Moreover, unlike Obama, who would have the U.S. bend over backwards to appease Muslim nations— or, in his case, just bend over — Reagan regularly lambasted the Soviet Union, dubbing it the “evil empire.” Finally, the Chinese never attacked America, unlike Islamic radicals, who not only have attacked it, but daily promise it death and destruction — all in the name of Islam.

The ultimate problem in the White House’s new “words-policy,” however, is reflected in this excerpt from the report:

The change [i.e., linguistic obfuscation] would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

Read the whole article.