Editorial: Scorecard says U.S. not confused about ‘radical Islam’

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi might be dead.

The Pentagon is skeptical, but it is checking reports from the Middle East, and no one doubts al-Baghdadi’s death certainly is possible. Some 13,000 airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition have taken out more than 120 top ISIS leaders in the last seven years. Al-Baghdadi — good riddance — would be just the latest to go.

That scorecard alone says the United States knows exactly whom it is fighting in the war on terror: Not Islam, but an extremist group that twists the religion to justify pure savagery.

Yet we have a joke of a presidential candidate — Donald Trump — who questions President Obama’s commitment to the fight against ISIS and its ilk simply because he declines to use the term “radical Islamic.” As if 120 dead ISIS leaders don’t make the point. Bizarrely, Trump implies Obama is an ISIS agent or fellow traveler.

A brief side note: Where are you now, Illinois Congressmen Peter Roskam, Randy Hultgren, Mike Bost, Rodney Davis, John Shimkus and Darin LaHood? Do you stand for anything other than winning? How much more must your party’s presumptive nominee disgrace himself before you fully call him out?

In a speech this week, Obama said he is loath to use the phrase “radical Islam” because he does not want to encourage people to conflate Muslim extremists such as ISIS with all Muslims. If, in saying this, the president appears to give Americans too little credit for making common-sense distinctions, tell that to Trump, who makes no distinctions at all. Trump would ban all Muslims from entering the country and keep a close, distrustful watch on those already here.

It is true, as critics have pointed out, that when our nation fought Germany and Japan in World War II, we made no bones about naming the enemy: Germany and Japan. The difference then is that we were, in fact, formally at war with those entire nations, their armed forces controlled by an emperor and a democratically elected dictator. ISIS was elected by nobody, though it would serve the group’s goals if the United States grew sloppy in its thinking and confused the enemy with all Islam. ISIS is looking for a holy war.

“They want us to validate them by implying that they speak for those billion-plus people, that they speak for Islam,” Obama said Tuesday. “That’s their propaganda. That’s how they recruit. And if we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush, and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.”

As Jeffrey Goldberg writes this week for The Atlantic, Obama over the years has repeatedly challenged the Muslim community to — in the president’s words — “address the real problems” of religious extremism. But, Goldberg writes, while Trump and others view the battle with ISIS as part of a larger clash of civilizations, Islam versus the West, Obama see ISIS as the product of a fight within Islam itself, between modernizers and fundamentalists.

When we demonize an entire world religion, we plays into the hands of those who would do our nation — and that religion — violent harm.

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