This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3547

Minor Victory In War On Terror,Fed PC Thought Police Defeated - banning of "offensive" terms overturned

July 24, 2008

Minor Victory In War On Terror, Fed PC Thought Police Defeated

Banning Of "Offensive" Terms Used To Describe Islamic Terror Network, Overturned By Hoekstra Intel Amendment

By WILLIAM MAYER and BEILA RABINOWITZ

July 24, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As we detailed in our April 25 piece Terms "Jihadist" And "Islamo-Fascist" Booted By Feds For Fear Of Antagonizing Jihadists and Islamo-Fascists intelligence bureaucrats within the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies, have been issuing directives banning the use of the terms ["jihadist," "Islamic fundamentalist" and "caliphate" for example] most useful in precisely describing the attributes of the fundamentalist Islamic terror network which attacked the United States on 9/11.

Supporting this attempted suppression of free speech are the usual gaggle of American Islamist fifth-columnists including the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR] an organization currently designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding prosecution. CAIR is claiming that jihad is not what most thinking Americans know it to be, religiously sanctioned warfare.

Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR, Michigan states that these terms reinforce, "...the positions of extremists and may unintentionally legitimize al-Qaida and other anti-American forces. CAIR supports using terminology such as 'criminals,' 'murderers' or 'terrorists' that helps isolate extremists and remove the false cloak of religiosity they use to justify their barbaric actions."

As these writers noted in the April piece:

"Employing the twisted logic of not wishing to further stoke whatever additional enmity might exist in those already sworn to destroying the United States and West, the federal government has issued directives to stop the use of some of the most appropriate phrases and terms now being used to identify and describe the forces seeking to Islamize the Western world by force..."

Working to turn back these efforts, Congressman Pete Hoekstra [R - MI] introduced [with a handful of co-sponsors] an amendment to the 2009 Intelligence Authorization Act which would deny the financing needed to put the proposed censorship in place.

Defeated in a party line vote in the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Silvestre Reyes [whose grasp of the terror landscape is tenuous, for example in a 2006 interview with Congressional Quarterly he was unable to correctly identify whether al-Qaeda or Hezbollah were primarily either Sunni or Shiite], Mr. Hoekstra then brought the bill [H R 5959] to the full House for a vote on July 16th whereupon it passed [249-180, see, http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll500.xml] with 55 Democrats crossing the line to vote against their leadership.

Prior to the bill's passage, Mr. Hoekstra stated on the House floor:

"Mr. Chairman, free speech should not be controversial, nor should candid, accurate, and fair discussion of the self-professed goals of the terrorists that attack our homeland and have sworn to kill more Americans.

I find it more than ironic that some who have complained the loudest about politicization in the intelligence community would oppose this simple amendment to prevent the politically correct politicization of our Nation's intelligence community. We all know that political correctness can be the enemy of clarity.

We also know that radical jihadists have made repeated efforts to stifle free speech in the West, including the murder of Dutch film maker, Theo van Gogh, and frequent death threats against authors, cartoonists, and journalists.

Let's not give the radical jihadists a victory here by imposing a speech code on America's intelligence community..."

Contacted today by PipeLineNews and speaking for Mr. Hoekstra, Jamal Ware, stated:

"This effort is about ensuring the ability of our nation's intelligence professionals to accurately define the threat facing the homeland in the terms being used by al-Qaeda. Radical jihadists are not worried about the words they use; they are focused squarely on killing Americans. We cannot let ourselves get bogged down in a debate about semantics. We need America's intelligence agencies focused on one thing: detecting and preventing the next attack."

The impetus behind this effort to remove the most precise descriptors that the language has regarding terrorism, might well be the intellectual meltdown that seems to be taking place in the waning months of the Bush administration, removing the constraints on State Department types which previously served to check their excesses.

It seems hard to believe that nearly 7 years into the war on terror that the institutions responsible for carrying the battle forward would still be so concerned with the use of even such fundamental concepts as jihad, whose meaning - "fighting in the way of Allah" - is completely unambiguous, having been rigorously defined over a thousand years ago by the eighth century Muslim jurist Mubarak, not long after the demise of Mohammed

That this understanding is essentially unchallenged in the Muslim world and is mirrored in the communiqués of such key terror players as bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri speaks volumes regarding where we are in the struggle between civilization and barbarism. http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=hoekstraid=7.24.08%2Ehtm

This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3547