The campaign, led in part by Georgetown University researcher Nathan Lean, opposes the accuracy of the language used to address the causes and results of terrorism leading up to and including the 9-11 terror attacks in New York and Washington perpetrated by Islamic terrorists.
The opponents to the 9-11 Memorial state:
...we have learned that the September 11 Memorial Museum uses the term "Islamic terrorism" in its advance materials, including a dedicated section of its website. In describing the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the materials state: "The bombing had a significant impact on America’s view of the threat of Islamic terrorism." Broadly among scholars and experts, this term is not believed to be useful in classification since there is nothing "Islamic" about these forms of political violence.The Museum has already capitulated and replaced "Islamic terrorism" with "Islamist extremism."
Further, the term's use problematically conflates the beliefs of 1.6 billion people with the violent acts of a few. Identical or similar terminology in the permanent exhibition risks that this influential institution will misstate or contradict scholarly efforts to generalize about "terrorist" violence and about the ideology of the individuals who implemented the September 11 attacks...
Islamism is generally viewed as political Islam. Different than the practice of the religion itself, Islamism is the effort to impose Islamic values and practices on all societies by any means available, including terrorism.
But whether the term used is Islamist or Islamic, the campaign to suppress the Memorial's use of such terminology is nothing short of a pathological manifestation of moral and cultural relativism.
The majority of the world's Muslims are peaceful and oppose terrorism. But that does not change the fact that Islam is the employed ideology by a great number of proponents of political and social violence in predominantly Muslim societies. When practitioners of Islam use their religion as the justification and basis of terrorist acts, then denying it is "terrorism" flouts all logic.
Terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, The Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaida, and the leadership of the terror-supporting dictatorship in Iran, among others, have Islam and the imposition of Islamic Sharia Law as their core ideological value. These academics opposed to any use of the term "Islamic terrorism" are no different than if someone had opposed using the term "Nazi" during World War 2, because it might give offense to all the Nazis who didn't personally staff concentration camps. Or imagine fighting the Cold War with legions of academics objecting to anyone describing Communist abuses as "Communist."
Actually that latter proposition isn't that hard to imagine, since are universities are already dense with professors who are retroactively trying to rehabilitate the Marxist and communist ideologies that led to the murders of 100 million people during the 20th Century.
To deny the existence of an obvious problem precludes any possibility of addressing it. Regrettably, many university programs are dominated by moral relativists who have had their heads buried so far up their own posteriors for so long, that they have begun to mistake their own defecation for nourishment.
New language at 9-11 Memorial website |
Next you will have Truthers demand to have their theories included.
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