I had an email the other day from my friend Buck Revel, the former top FBI official.
Buck spent 30 years in the Bureau. It was a remarkable career. Among other things he ran all Criminal Investigations, as well as Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Intelligence.
He was furious about a dumb move by the current administration. It is this:
The US government is quietly dropping the words “jihad” and any reference to “radical Islam” or the word “Islam” in public statements by its officials when they talk about terrorism. They also do not want the word “liberty”, referring to a social and political condition, used as something the people of a country can aspire to. They don’t want to offend Muslims.
This Orwellian news originally came from Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project who has backed it up with documents from Homeland Security, the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center. He sent them to Buck Revel and me and many others.
One of the documents is titled “Words that Work and Words that Don’t –a Guide for Counterterrorism Communication.
Another of the documents, slugged For Official Use Only, is titled “Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims.”
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to identify the "influential Muslims” and "leading U.S.-based scholars and commentators on Islam" who met with Secretary Michael Chertoff and influenced this new, politically correct and flaccid approach to terrorists and what drives them.
I can tell you what drives the radical Islamists. It’s no secret. In fact. The terrorists will tell you themselves since now the US government can’t: religion and ideology, although the new official American policy is to pretend otherwise.
So America, says Steve Emerson, after serving for more than two centuries as the sanctuary for huddled masses yearning to breathe free, is being asked to be verbally respectful to fanatics bent on a global religious state.
The memos –a particularly loony one come from Homeland Security’s “Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,” don’t offer examples to show where Islam and secular democracy have reinforced each other, or explain how Sharia law, the imposition of religion into state affairs, is "fully compatible" with secular democracy, but that is the line they are pushing with the US government. Ridiculous and stupid.