President Obama has finally spelled it out:  “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”  That is apparently why he and his administration refuse to identify terrorists from ISIL/ISIS, Al-Qaeda, etc., as Muslim terrorists or Islamic terrorists.  Does he have a point?

No, he does not.  No one but the weirdos is arguing that the U. S. is or should be “at war with Islam.”  The U. S. is not at war with a religion, our enemies are terrorists:  Muslim terrorists, Islamic terrorists, or Islamist terrorists – the very terms that our President refuses not utter.  How do we know they are terrorists?

Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Al-Qaeda, Abu Nidal Organization, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIL, ISIS,  and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are terrorist organizations that should be viewed as our enemy, that are seeking to harm or destroy the U. S.. We know that because each is an organization listed by the United States State Department as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”  We also know that the membership and leadership of each organization are solely or primarily Muslims, regardless of whether they view themselves as “Islamist” – people who believe that Sharia Law, not civil law, should govern all aspects of civil and social life as well as religious life and who are extremely militant (if not downright gruesome) in their behavior toward those who do not share their views.

So, for the benefit of the Obama administration, let’s make this simple.   All of these people have two things in common:  they are terrorists, and they are Muslims. In English, that makes them Muslim terrorists.  We are at war with Islamists and other Muslims, but we are not at war with Islam itself.    We are battling people, not a religion.

Yes, there are lots of Muslims in the world who are not terrorists, just as there were lots of Germans who were not Nazis, but so what?  If the President wants to begin every statement with an acknowledgment that there are lots of good Muslims in the world and that we respect them and their religion, and that we will do everything we can to help them, fine.  But to turn ourselves into an international laughingstock by sending out a squad of Valley girls to lecture us on the nuances of the White House’s tortured semantics and passive foreign policy, is a pretty bizarre way to stumble into World War III.