The United States government has launched a new front in its war on terrorism. It’s not a military attack on another nation or organization—it’s a battle against terminology. Federal agencies—including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center—are instructing their personnel to shun any jargon that could infer a link between Islam and terrorist activities conducted by Muslims.

According to a National Counterterrorism Center report, terms such as “jihadist” and “Islamo-fascism” may offend moderate Muslims or confer legitimacy upon extremist Muslims and should therefore be abandoned in favor of euphemisms like “violent extremist” and “terrorist.” This same report also recommends people use descriptive terms like “South Asian youth” or “Arab opinion leaders” to describe those involved in specific terrorism cases, instead of labeling groups as “Muslims” or “Islamist.”

Top-level officials like U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seem to be taking this advice to heart. Rice, who used to refer to “jihad” frequently, hasn’t publicly used the word since September except when referring to the name of a specific terrorist group.

The stated purpose of this new rhetorical strategy is to rob Islamic extremists of legitimacy in the eyes of moderate Muslims by denying these extremists any link with the ideology they purport to uphold. In actuality, however, this strategy is only showing the Islamic world how confused U.S. leadership is concerning the true theological motivation driving jihadis to seek to destroy Western civilization.

The Middle East Timesreports:

The Bush administration has decided that calling the enemy by his name is too risky, too politically incorrect, or oddly, somehow too laudatory.And so, henceforth federal agencies of the United States government are to refrain from identifying the Islamic jihad with words that in any way convey genuine understanding about the links between terrorism and religion in the war that has been launched against Western liberal democratic civilization. …That the U.S. administration could even suppose that its choice of vocabulary might influence the jihadi enemy betrays a woeful lack of understanding about what actually motivates him. …What motivates the international Islamic jihad movement is a literal textual interpretation of doctrinal Islam as laid out in the Koran, hadith, and Sunna plus centuries of Islamic scholarship and consensus on the concept of just war. Within this construct, it is true that words such as jihad, mujahedin and Caliphate carry intensely positive and honorable connotations–-for the Muslim jihadis–-but hardly for the rest of us, their intended targets for subjugation within the totalitarian system that sharia would impose ….What Americans need to understand is that Islamic jihadis, whether part of a formal terrorist organization such as al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood, or merely ideologically driven by the actions and proclamations of such groups, are internally motivated by what they believe is a divine mandate to fight and kill until the entire world comes under the sway of Dar al-Islam (where sharia law prevails).

The jihadi enemy is waging an ideological as well as a literal war against the United States. The root ideological aspect of this war is summed up well by the philosophy of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” Altering the vocabulary used to refer to these Islamic extremists is not going to change their mission and it is not going to lessen the support they receive from Arab and Muslim audiences around the world.

Actually, the mere fact that U.S. leaders are willing to put forward such a strategy shows they are already losing in the war of ideas. The only way to win any war or confrontation involves an accurate assessment of the enemy’s capacities, scope of operations, intentions and, above all, motivations.

For more information on the true ideology driving jihadi terrorists, read “Why We Cannot Win the War Against Terrorism” by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.