If you define “political correctness” as social or political beliefs that cannot be questioned without triggering outrage and condemnation, then this is the right’s particular political correctness about terrorism: If you do not explicitly use the label “radical Islamic” or “Islamic extremism” in conjunction with the word “terrorist” or “terrorism,” you cannot hope to win the War on Terror. Put slightly differently, if you do not explicitly acknowledge that “terrorism” is, by definition, a war against Americans that is being conducted by Islamic extremists and that is motivated by radical Islam, then you cannot hope to effectively or successively prevent or stop terrorist attacks from happening.
The latest example of this specific form of political correctness is a very long Weekly Standard article co-authored by Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, and titled “Don’t Mention the War.” In the tag line underneath the title, the authors ask, “Why does the Obama administration find it so hard to utter the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘jihad’ and ‘Islamic extremism’?”
One might just as easily ask Hayes and Joscelyn why they (and the political right in general) find it so difficult to utter the words “Christian extremists” or “Jewish extremists” or even simply “religious extremists.” Or why it is a matter of no remark — not a matter of little remark, but a matter of absolutely NO remark whatsoever — when state lawmakers and mainstream anti-abortion leaders calmly explain that the impetus for the recently passed Nebraska law banning abortions after 20 weeks was to put Dr. Leroy Carhart out of business, because after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, Carhart is the only late-term abortion provider left? (Emphasis is mine.)
Mary Spaulding Balch, who directs the National Right to Life Committee’s state legislation, says the [health care reform] opt-out bills have contributed to the volume of anti-abortion legislation being “stronger than in [previous] years.”
But … Spaulding Balch cautions against reading the Nebraska and Oklahoma victories as health care reform fallout. She sees the Oklahoma law as a “natural progression” that grew out of other states’ less stringent ultrasound requirements.
And the Nebraska law, she says, was drafted with a very specific goal: to regulate LeRoy Carhart, an Omaha-based abortion provider who is one of the country’s few late-term specialists. “When George Tiller was killed, LeRoy Carhart had national attention,” says Spaulding Balch. “That alerted Speaker Mike Flood to the problem in Nebraska and he worked to address that.”
Why do right-wing media outlets like The Weekly Standard collapse, hyperventilating, onto the fainting couch because they don’t hear the words “radical Islamic jihadi terrorism” coming out of the President’s mouth in response to a failed bombing attempt by someone so incompetent that international terrorist groups are swearing he didn’t get his training from them; while they have nothing whatsoever to say when the national director of state legislation for the largest mainstream anti-abortion organization in the country tells the press that legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks and requiring women to have mental health screenings before having an abortion was a response to the “problem” of there still being one late-term abortion provider left after the only other one had been murdered?
Even more to the point, why does no one else see anything wrong with that?
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