Enabler-speak

OPINION:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has outdone itself. This week its chairman, Parvez Ahmed, accused the Bush administration of “Islamophobia,” fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment and creating a climate of irrationality and fear about Islam. He then delivered this instant classic in doublespeak: “The new perception is that the United States has entered a war with Islam itself.”

This is not new, and it’s not some disembodied “perception.” It is CAIR’s view, and it has been CAIR’s view for years. Mr. Ahmed and friends actually share this perception that the United States is at war with Islam, and they want to promote it. Don’t be fooled.

We won’t even go into the great extent to which President Bush stresses in virtually every major speech on terrorism that the enemy is terrorists waving a Muslim banner, not Islam. It evidently does not matter that the United States is spilling its soldiers’ blood and expending national treasure in Iraq to save the country from al Qaeda and from its own radical butchers. It does not matter that the United States undertook the most effective international humanitarian mission in memory to Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Both situations build on a recent history of intervention on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo and in defense of a Muslim nation, Kuwait, against Saddam Hussein’s depredations.

All that matters is that some people hostile to the United States who dismiss these achievements believe that the country and its president are “Islamophobic.” This is then used by CAIR to scare up the notion.

As long as Mr. Ahmed and friends are happy to equate the wars the United States is waging against Islamist terrorists with a war against Islam, then this makes them guilty of the conflation of subject matter which they allege from the administration. Just another day in CAIR-land.

We’d like to second David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who spoke at the same event as Mr. Ahmed. “If CAIR wants respect as representing the best of Islam to the West, it must shun the role of enabler by siding with the enemies of terror and intolerance wherever they are found,” Mr. Keene said. Well put.

Instead, we get spurious accusations about “Islamophobia” and intimations that the problem is the United States, not the radical Islamist terrorists.

Reasonable people grow hoarse repeating it, but here it is again. Being at war with enemies who are Muslim does not constitute a war against Islam. We, too, are in shock that this debate is so impoverished that the point bears repeating.