WASHINGTON - The Obama administration's recent move to drop rhetorical references to Islamic radicalism is being criticized in a new report warning the decision ignores the role religion can play in motivating terrorists.
Several prominent counterterror experts are challenging the administration's shift in its recently unveiled National Security Strategy, saying the terror threat should be defined in order to fight it.
The question of how to frame the conflict against al-Qaida and other terrorists poses a knotty problem. The U.S. is trying to mend fences with Muslim communities while toughening its strikes against militant groups.
In the report, due out in coming days, counterterrorism experts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy argue that the U.S. could clearly articulate the threat from radical Islamic extremists "without denigrating the Islamic religion in any way."
People are also reading…
President Obama has argued that words matter, and administration officials have said that the use of inflammatory descriptions linking Islam to the terror threat feed the enemy's propaganda and may alienate moderate Muslims.
In the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press, the analysts warn that U.S. diplomacy must sharpen the distinction between the Muslim faith and violent Islamist extremism, identify radicalizers within Islamic communities and empower voices that can contest the radical teachings.
Militant Islamic propaganda has reportedly been a factor in a spate of recent terror attacks and foiled attempts.
The report acknowledges that the Obama administration has beefed up efforts to work with the Muslim community in the U.S. and abroad, and has also expanded counterterrorism operations and tried to erode and divide al-Qaida and its affiliated groups.
Terror leaders "play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims," top administration counterterror deputy John Brennan said during a May 24 speech explaining the shift.
But the administration's two-pronged approach of stepping up counterterror operations while tamping down its rhetoric, the critics argue, needs to also include an ideological counterattack.
"There is an ideology that is driving al-Qaida and its affiliates," said Matt Levitt, one of the authors of the study on countering violent extremism.
The administration, Levitt said, has to separate discussion of Islam as a religion from the radical Islamic ideology that is producing and fueling global insurgencies. .
