Mick Hartley

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Non-Offensive Terrorists

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.

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4 responses to “Non-Offensive Terrorists”

  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.

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  2. Noga Avatar
    Noga

    “An EU official said that the secret guidebook, or, “common lexicon”, is aimed at preventing the distortion of the Muslim faith and the alienation of Muslims in Europe.”
    In the Nurenberg Trials, terminology played a crucial role in the transference of meaning. When the Nazi Propaganda Minister Goering was questioned, he managed quite successfully to cast doubts as to the way certain terms, quoted from official Nazi documents, were translated from the German.
    When cross-examination turned to the persecution of the Jewish population, the prosecution presented as evidence a short letter from Goering to Heydrich in which “the final solution to the Jewish problem” was the main issue. Goering challenged the translation, claiming that the correct term should have stated “the total solution” to the Jewish problem, and not the “final solution” as it came to be known in contemporary Western media. He was aiming mutating the understanding of his target audience. Fully aware of the heavily emotional charge that had accrued to the term “final solution” he wanted to lessen the burden by suggesting that another term be used instead. A euphemistic variation such as “the total solution” would have divested the concept of its immediate connotations, blunting the sharpness of the allusion and thus maybe softening its impact, to Goering’s advantage in court. In this case, while the court conceded certain linguistic points to the accused, it must have been fully aware that in the context 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.

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  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.

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  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.

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