Newly appointed National Security Adviser H R McMaster believes using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is counterproductive because terrorists are “un-Islamic.”
A report in the The New York Times, citing participants of Lt. Gen. McMaster’s first National Security Council meeting, says terorists pervert their religion.
“Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion,” McMaster reportedly said, according to the Times. He added that terrorists are fundamentally “un-Islamic.”
President Donald Trump with his NSA pick Lt Gen McMaster February 20, 2017
Photo : Screenshot/Official White House video
In his language, McMaster differs from some conervative voices in the Trump Administration who want to use terms like “raditcal Islamic terrorism” – which are anathema to American Muslims as well as leaders of the Muslim countries that the U.S. must work with to stamp out the menace of terror.
Officials in the administrations of former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both took pains to separate acts of terrorism from Islamic teaching.
Analysts have also long argued that using such inflammatory expressions plays exactly into the militant narrative.
According to William McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “The ISIS Apocalypse,” McMaster is aware that the United States “should not play into the jihadi propaganda that this is a religious war.”
Interfaith and American Muslim leaders have also opposed the use of such rhetoric as it implicates entire communities in the actions committed by a few, mostly fringe elements.
