According to the US News & World Report (Sept. 27), President Bush uses the words “Islamic terrorist” with a clear agenda: the words “extremism,” “radical” and “Muslim” do not have the same dramatic tone as “Islamist terrorist.” The report says that while Bush has lightened up on using the word “Islamic” before terrorists, the advisers said in the background that the word should always be used because Americans believe that “Islamists” are those who act on terrorist threats. Words to avoid are “Muslim,” “extremist” and “radicals.”
According to the report one adviser, who was part of two closed-door briefings by consultants to the GOP congressional members and aides over the past two weeks, said most Americans polled are not threatened by “Muslims” and that the words “extremist” and “radical” conjure up an image of people who make threats, but don’t follow through with them. “People believe ‘terrorists’ act, so we should be using that instead of ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’. Calling the threat ‘an Islamist terrorist’ or ‘al-Qaeda’ works better than ‘Muslim radical’,” said the consultant.
Recently “Islamo-fascism” has become Mr. Bush’s favorite expression. People can choose to use whatever words they like to describe people or events. While we cannot say this for a lot of things, we do it when we feel we can get away with it. But words come with consequences.
Every word we choose reveals something deeper about what we understand multiculturalism to be.
Canadian philosopher and political scientist Charles Taylor, one of the most brilliant and somewhat underrated minds of our century, identifies the current crisis of multiculturalism as one that concerns not so much respecting others, but as relating to how people perceive themselves vis-à-vis others. Taylor believes that multiculturalism has once again become suspect and “almost every reason for toleration’s apparent fall into disrepute concerns Islam” (”The Collapse of Tolerance,” Guardian, Sept. 17).
Taylor sees the current debate about Islam and Muslims in Europe as a crisis of multiculturalism. Why? Because Islam has become part of the public debate to determine how far multiculturalism will go. Take the 2004 decision by France to ban the wearing of the headscarf in public schools. The media campaign in support of the ban went way beyond girls covering their heads in public schools. The debate covered almost everything from the true spirit of France and Europe to violence against women, integration, assimilation and pluralism. John Bowen’s brilliant survey “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Service” critically analyzes the French debate and confirms Taylor’s point: Islam and its various contestations have become the outer limit of multiculturalism in Europe.
Are things any better in the US? While the US always takes pride in its long history of multiculturalism, the same eclipse of reason is taking place there as well. The US president uses “Islamo-fascism” as if it is a term of common parlance. How Islam and fascism have come to form a single ideology in Mr. Bush’s political language is a mystery. Yet the effect is clear: yes to all diversity except for those who we think are the bad guys. The problem is not to identify evil for what it is. The problem is that you do it in such a way that a buzzword like Islamic terrorism, fundamentalism, etc., captures every nuance there is out there to the human tragedy we live in. Taylor calls this way of looking at things “block thinking.” He goes on to say that “block thinking fuses a varied reality into one indissoluble unity, and in two ways. First, “different manifestations of Islam