The Obama administration has created a political divide, with opponents and others parsing the language the White House uses in talking of terrorist atrocities,
National Journal reports.
President Barack Obama has doubled down against critics who have dissected his word choices, noting he is carefully seeking in his language not to give legitimacy to violent extremists who he says have "perverted Islam."
He struck out as he spoke at a
White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism at such groups as al-Qaida and the Islamic State, who he said "try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam," the Journal reported.
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Obama added: "We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. They are not religious leaders. They're terrorists. And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam."
Even the president's ongoing use of ISIL versus the more common ISIS for the Islamic State has created wide debate over his messaging.
The Washington Post attempted to explain the significance of the meaning of the two, for example, by exploring the root of the words in different ways.
Other conservative pundits, undaunted by the semantical defense, have expressed outrage at the White House's language choices, calling them deliberate and broadly anti-Christian, particularly in the case of the recent mass beheading of 21 Coptic Christian prisoners from Egypt, who were once described by Obama as simply "citizens."
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Said Charles Krauthammer
on Fox News: "We have an administration that will not even admit that there is a religious basis for what's going on."
Added George Will, who appeared on the same segment, according to the Journal: "Why can't they say what specifically happened? … At this point it's beyond burlesque, It's pathological. It's clinical … their inability to accurately describe things."
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