Davis Merritt: Is KKK a ‘violent Christian extremist’ group?

What we call things matters. The names and descriptors we assign to people or objects or concepts become semantic boxes that define, and thus limit, how people think and talk about those things. So caution and deliberation are essential when we name and describe an unfamiliar person, object or, in the case of the Islamic State, concept.

Thus President Obama was at great pains last week to avoid the multiple semantic traps lurking in the three-day discussion he started with other nations about dealing with ISIS and other terrorist groups.

For those pains he received predictable heckling from the political right, whose key talking point quickly became that Obama must utter the magic words “violent Islamic extremists,” as if that alone would make things better. That was a bad idea from the start, and none of the hecklers and coat-holders on the right offered an alternate strategy other than “destroy ISIS,” which is bombast, not a strategy.

Here’s why the name game matters.

What would Obama’s hecklers say if someone called the Ku Klux Klan “a violent Christian extremist” group? Or labeled the American Nazis “violent conservative extremists”? Both statements would be accurate, but neither would be true. Those on the far right would immediately and angrily deny that the KKK is a true reflection of Christianity and the Nazis a true reflection of conservatism. And they would be correct.

If our president – this one or the next one – is going to get the international help necessary to deal with ISIS, he or she, at a minimum, must not link the apocalyptic vision and savage tactics of ISIS to the religion of 1.5 billion other people.

For recruiting, self-justification and support purposes, ISIS needs all Muslims to believe that the West is waging a religious war. Careless labeling and reckless blather from Western leaders advance that goal. What Washington’s hawks charge is softness or, worse, indifference on Obama’s part is, in fact, the only hope for containing ISIS. That’s because only Muslims – national leaders, clerics, ordinary people – can purge the poison of ISIS from their religion. Lumping all 1.5 billion of them with ISIS’ thugs and psychopaths in one semantic box is poor incentive for them to risk their lives and status.

Without question, enough U.S. troops could take ISIS off the battlefield, and our killing tens of thousands of the enemy might be a feel-good for chest-thumpers who mistake projecting American power for projecting American values. But what then? Defeating religious extremists in traditional military battles does not resolve the core problem; we’ve been there and done that, and so have the Russians and the French and the Turks and the British and the Mongols and the Crusaders.

It was encouraging to hear Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh take ownership of the problem last week, saying several times that “this is our war as Muslims” and “our collective war as an international community.”

That international community will never rally around America’s founding principles, despite Obama’s most earnest Wilsonian urgings. Nations, whether run by elected leaders or dictators or royal dynasties or mullahs, always will act in what those leaders perceive as the national interest, which is not necessarily – or even often – the same thing as their peoples’ interest. But if they rally around the goal of eliminating or containing ISIS because they know it’s in their national interest, that’s a useful first step.

This story was originally published February 23, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Is KKK a ‘violent Christian extremist’ group?."