Sanity Squad at 8 PM tonight
Click here to listen as Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Shrinkwrapped, and I discuss the Arab Mind, based on Shrink’s series of the same name.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Click here to listen as Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Shrinkwrapped, and I discuss the Arab Mind, based on Shrink’s series of the same name.
Excellent amplification of Siggy’s series on “The Arab Mind.” But, did I note a hint of politically-correct euphemisticality — or is it cultural delicacy — in not being more descriptive as to what “abuse” means in this context . . . who, what, when?
Years ago, a Paul Bowles essay on “The Arab” led me to wonder if there weren’t the problems Siggy describes.
Please do continue this general discussion.
This article is warning about the very thing I have been screaming about all year.
This idiocy in Washington is going to ruin everything our troops are acheiving.
Strategic Collapse in the War on Terror
By Joseph Myers
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/strategic_collapse_in_the_war.html
Words matter, and in the global war on terror we are losing the battle of words, in a self-inflicted defeat. The consequences could not be more profound.
Recent government policy memoranda, circulating through the national counter-terrorism and diplomatic community, establishes a new “speech code” for the lexicon in the war on terror, as reported by the Associated Press and now available in the public domain .
These new “speech codes” recommended that analysts and policy makers avoid the terms jihad or jihadist or mujhadid or “al-Qaida movement” and replace them with “extremists” and by extension other non-specific terms.
The use of these “new words” and rejection of the “old words” is ostensibly designed to avoid legitimating al-Qaida and its followers while mollifying the sensitivities of the larger Muslim community.
This culmination of previous trends does not surprise me at all.
This is more than simply dancing on the pinhead of cultural sensitivity-words have meaning, ideas have consequences.
This policy is a strategic collapse.
[snip see link for the rest of the article]