Steve Emerson: The terrorists are winning

Why? Because the political and media establishment still can't bring itself to call terrorism what it is: an Islamic movement that operates on religious principles. Excerpt:

On Wednesday, even though everyone knew by then that the [Mumbai] perpetrators were jihadists, CNN constantly referred to the terrorists as "extremists"--with no modifier. Hell, they could have been the Basque ETA or the ultra right wing U.S. militia. Then a CNN anchor asked his guest with totally innocence, "Now why would an extremist group target a Jewish house of worship?" Because, my dear politically correct anchor, it was an Islamist terrorist group.

The most that government officials, in cahoots with mainstream media, could utter were names like Al Qaeda (AQ) or Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT) as potential suspects. Yet even here, the discussions were mindless. One talking head said it could not be AQ since AQ behavior is to have massive simultaneous explosions (as if Al Qaeda follows a pre-programmed script). Another expert said LeT did not have the resources to carry it out, forgetting ever so slightly that all Islamic terrorist groups share resources, recruit from other terrorist groups, train each other, provide each other with equipment and, most importantly of all, want to destroy their "enemies."

In the United States, after 9/11, a group of American men (mostly converts) pleaded guilty or were found to be guilty of training with LeT and of trying to "wage war" against the United States. Evidence produced in the trial showed that LeT's website--before being taken down--focused disproportionately on two enemies: Americans and Jews. In 2004, Ismail Royer, an official with the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR) who had trained with the Taliban, pled guilty to weapons and explosives charges. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In later grand jury testimony, Royer admitted that the cell's primary goal was to fight with the Taliban against United States forces in Afghanistan.

Our politically craven governments, followed in part by the media, have now started to ban the use of the term "Islamic terrorists" or "Islamic militants," insisting that they simply be called "extremists" or militants. The government's rationale was a page picked right out of the playbook of western radical Islamic strategy: Portray the use of the term "Islamic terrorist" as "racist" and as allegedly stigmatizing all Muslims.

Last year, the Departments of State and Homeland Security issued an internal memorandum that henceforth no one could use the term "Islamic terrorists" and could only use the generic term "militant" or "extremist." Even President Bush, who once invoked the term "Islamofacism," now refuses to use the term Islamic terrorist. In Canada, the author Mark Steyn was the subject of three human rights complaints and subsequent trials for calling radical Muslims terrorists and other such "slurs." He won all three tribunals.

It is time to stop caving in to the PC crowd. If we refuse to use the term Islamic terrorist, we conveniently take away any onus of responsibility for Islamic groups to halt the murderous ideology they propagate. In fact, in nearly EVERY claim of responsibility, which I studied, for hundreds of violent Islamic attacks which took place since 9/11, the common justification by the Muslim terrorist perpetrator was that there was a "war against Muslims" by the West and the Jews that had to be avenged. The real truth is that there is war against the West and the Jews by Islamic jihadists. And no amount of territorial withdrawal or peace negotiations will assuage them.

Read the whole thing. As the old saying goes about the devil, so it applies to Islamists: their best weapon is the refusal of quite a few people to believe that they exist. Seven years after 9/11, given what we've seen in London, in Madrid, in Mumbai and other places, it's utterly insane that we should even be having this discussion now. But dreams and illusions die hard.