If ‘religiously motivated violence’ treated as security or political issue, it can’t be overcome.
President George W. Bush famously stood at the site of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and said Islam was a religion of peace and the Muslim terror attackers were not representative of the faith.
President Obama has declined, repeatedly, to even say the works “Islamic terrorist” and has protected Islam whenever the discussion of terror arises.
In a column in the London Telegraph, parliamentarian Rehman Chishti said the Islamic State, ISIS, really isn’t Islamic and really isn’t a state, so those “sadistic and loathsome murderers” should be called some “derogatory” term like Daesh.
Enough, says Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
“If we treat religiously motivated violence solely as a security issue, or a political issue, then it will be incredibly difficult – probably impossible – to overcome it,” he said recently. “A theological voice needs to be part of the response, and we should not be bashful in offering that.”
Boris Johnson’s column in the Telegraph quotes Chishti.
His “point is that if you call it Islamic State you are playing their game, you are dignifying their criminal and barbaric behavior; you are giving them a propaganda boost that they don’t deserve, especially in the eyes of some impressionable young Muslims. He wants us all to drop the terms, in favor of more derogatory names such as ‘Daesh’ or ‘Faesh,’ and his point deserves a wider hearing.”
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