By Daniel Greenfield ——Bio and Archives--March 1, 2017
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President Donald Trump's new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, advised him in a closed-door meeting last week to stop using a phrase that was a frequent refrain during the campaign: "radical Islamic terrorism."
But the phrase will be in the president's speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, according to a senior White House aide—even though McMaster reviewed drafts and his staff pressed the president's chief speechwriter and senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, not to use it. What the president decides to say in his address will be an early indication of McMaster's clout within the administration. McMaster, a career officer, was brought in after the ouster of Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn, an early and loyal Trump supporter who said violence was a feature of Islam.If you can't define the problem, then you can't solve it. It's that simple. The establishment failed to solve the problem because they refused to define it. They refused to say out loud what everyone knows to be true. And the further away we have gone from September 11, the more the policy consensus on it has softened. We are constantly lectured about all the Muslim allies we need to win this war. Allies like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, and Qatar. Our "allies" against terrorism finance and aid terrorists. We have spent too long living a lie. And we won't accomplish anything if we can't tell the truth about this war.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.