In his multiple Sunday talk show appearances this week, Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson echoed the defenders of the Obama administration’s refusal to use terms like “radical Islamism” to refer to the likes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Johnson argued that a debate over what to call ISIS is not as important as how the United States responds to the terrorist organization’s threats to the country and its allies.
“Whether it’s referred to as Islamic extremism or violent extremism, what it comes down to is ISIL is a terrorist organization that represents a serious potential threat to our homeland, which has to be addressed,” Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. “I’m more concerned about that frankly than I am about what two words we use to refer to them.”
But this is the Obama administration trying to have it both ways. The president, in fact, argues that how we refer to ISIS is critical for our effort to stop their reign of terror.
“I want to be very clear about how I see it: Al Qaeda and ISIL and groups like it are desperate for legitimacy. They try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam,” Obama said last week, during the White House’s summit on “combatting violent extremism.” “That is why ISIL presumes to declare themselves ‘The Islamic State.’ They propagate the notion that America, and the West generally, is at war with Islam. That is how they recruit. That is how they try to radicalize young people.”
Or, as Johnson put it Sunday: “To refer to ISIL as occupying any part of the Islamic theology is playing on a battlefield that they would like us to be on. I think that to call them some form of Islam gives the group more dignity than it deserves frankly. It is a terrorist organization.”
So which is it? The White House seems to want to set aside the debate over how to refer to ISIS while simultaneously asserting how critical it is to not refer to the terrorist group’s (blatantly obvious) radical Islamic ideology. (For more details on what ISIS wants, be sure to read Graeme Wood’s feature in the Atlantic.)
There may be good reasons, for the sake of national security and foreign policy, for administration officials to downplay ISIS’s religious ideology. But Obama’s outright denial of the group’s Islamism strains credulity, as does the insistence by his supporters that it just doesn’t matter what you call them.
