Mick Hartley

Non-Offensive Terrorists

Written by

Mick Hartley

in

This is inspiring:

The European Union has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to refrain from linking Islam and terrorism in their statements.

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers “non-offensive” phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.

Banned terms are said to include “jihad”, “Islamic” or “fundamentalist”.

The word “jihad” is to be avoided altogether, according to some sources, because for Muslims the word can mean a personal struggle to live a moral life.

One alternative, suggested publicly last year, is for the term “Islamic terrorism” to be replaced by “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”.

Even better, why just not say anything at all. That way no one’ll be offended.

Comments

  1. Francis Sedgemore Avatar
    Francis Sedgemore

    “Even better, why just not say anything at all.”
    As a journalist who has on a number of occasions struggled to get quotes from EU officials, I find this deeply unfunny.

    Reply
  2. Noga Avatar
    Noga

    of historical evidence, any term selected to describe the genocidal plans would have eventually assumed the same contextual and emotionally-charged meaning.
    So, in my opinion, the way human understanding works, “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam” will soon accrue the exact same meaning that “Islamic terrorism” does. The whole exercise is a futile mind game generated by PC illusions. It’s exactly the same sort of self-delusion that antisemites practice when they replace “Jew” with “Zionist” in attempting to present themselves as mere critics of “Zionism”.
    Even Mick’s solution that “Even better, why just not say anything at all. That way no one’ll be offended.” will not work for long. Suppose a terrorist attack occurs and the formal annnouncement will avoid any mention of Muslims. And suppose in cases when attacks were carried out, non-Muslim groups were fully identified. The silence that accompanies those cases where attacks were unindentified would eventually come to mean: Muslim.

    Reply
  3. Noga Avatar
    Noga

    Look what’s considered offensive to Muslims, too:
    “Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.
    It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. ”
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk:80/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445979&in_page_id=1770
    I wonder if the “classified handbook which offers “non-offensive” phrases” covers this topic, too.

    Reply
  4. Matt Munro Avatar
    Matt Munro

    Its the same old PC argument. Change the words and you will change the association (linguistic determinism and Sapir-Worf hypothesis). The hypothesis has been falsified many times, I can’t be bothered to explain the falsification here in detail, but in simple terms if you change the words and you do not change the thought. What actually happens is that the same association just becomes attached to the new words.
    The aim of newspeak in the novel 1984 was to reduce language to just one word, thus making thought-crime impossible. PC tries to do the same thing, by outlawing any words which are incomaptible with PC, the aim is to make politically incorrect thought timpossible. Apart from being a grotesquely arrogant and immoral exercise in attempted mind control, it is doomed to failure.

    Reply

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