Afrasianet - Mazen Al , Najjar - A nation that claims a universal right to kill without trial, detain without charge, surveillance without limits, and wage wars without end, does not defend freedom. It complements domination. 

Before military battles erupt, there is a battle of propaganda to win hearts and minds, especially in the context of centuries-old imperialist discourse. Empire fights wars not only with iron and fire, but also with words. The first victim is not the truth, specifically, but precision, the ability to describe things as they are, not as brute force wants them to seem.

Therefore, it is important to consider how to talk about America's so-called "war on terror"; a quarter of a century into this never-ending war, the Irish scholar and thinker, Dylan Evans, suggests that if we want to call it by its proper name, it is: the war on Islam and the Muslim world. 

Insisting on calling a spade a spade is not pedantry or exaggeration; it is a form of resistance to ideology. Ideology flourishes where language is twisted into "euphemism," mummified abstractions, or selective blindness – violence is renamed "security," hegemony becomes "peacekeeping" missions, terrorism is renamed "freedom," genocide is renamed "the right to self-defense," and civilians are targeted with destruction with "collateral damage."

This struggle for precision is not new. Dissidents and dissidents in the West have long understood that surviving the empire of lies requires an unrelenting devotion to the truth—not just to the obvious, but to the told. This vision coincides with the experience of revolutionaries, dissidents, and critics of their governments. Despite their different backgrounds, they share a fundamental obligation: to speak clearly in an age of deliberate confusion and confusion.

"The Great Satan"

Why, then, are we exhausting our attempts to speak accurately about the "war on Islam"? These efforts are important for the simple reason that there are many among us who resist calling a spade a spade and systematically mischaracterize moral and political reality in the service of ideology. The ideology in question is a closed totalitarian regime that neglects and rejects what it does not "fall into", and it is useless to accurately describe what is going on. 

For example, after the 1979 Iranian revolution, commentators claimed moral parity between Iran and the United States, based on completely erroneous descriptions of the two regimes. This view was not shared by the brave dissidents of the American group Nation of Islam. Surprisingly, many American dissidents did not object to Ayatollah Khomeini's description of the United States as the "Great Satan." 

They were also aware that democratic protest against the Shah's corrupt regime led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and to a radical improvement in Iran's social and political system. They knew that Iranian political leaders should take the language of the Koran seriously because it is the lingua franca of Iranian political culture. When they saw that the Iranians had found a way to make things right, these American dissidents were amazed by the vitriol that Iranian Americans in Los Angeles were expressing about Iran. 

"Loss of meaning" and "elusive language"

In a 1985 article titled "Anatomy of Secrecy," Václav Havel, a Czech dissident, playwright and the first president of the Czech Republic after 1989, noted that representatives of Western peace groups who visited his country were often suspicious of dissidents like him. 

Havel and other dissidents have paid the price for their protests against an authoritarian regime with prison sentences, beatings, or worse. But they found themselves seen as "suspiciously prejudiced against the realities of socialism, not competent critics of Western democracy, and perhaps even sympathizers... With those hated Western weapons. In short, those opposed were, for representatives of peace groups, a fifth column of Western capitalism east of the Yalta line."

Western visitors were unmoved when Havel tried to explain that the word "peace" itself had been emptied of its meaning due to its frequent use in official communist slogans such as "struggle for peace" against "capitalist exploiters." While the opponent, "unable to protect himself or his children,

skeptical of the ideological mentality, and knows firsthand where appeasement can lead," has been positioned in the position of fearing "loss of meaning," including diminishing meaning and power of words.  

Emptying words of their meaning is a sign of what Havel calls "quasi-ideological thinking," which separates the words we use from the facts they claim to describe. What Havel calls "evasive language" has "separated thought from its direct contact with reality," as the American philosopher Jane Bethke Elstein noted in a 1993 essay, citing Havell, "cripples his ability to intervene effectively in this reality."

Why do they hate Muslims?

This line of thinking directly relates to how we talk about American extremism. Just as the words "slave" and "slavery"  are distorted in Western tradition, when applied only to those who buy and sell human beings, but not to those who surrender themselves to God, the word "extremist" is unrecognizably distorted if used randomly. 

Care should be taken to properly use the term. American extremists are those who kill what they consider their "objective enemy," regardless of what they may have committed or not. The term "American extremism" has entered ordinary language to denote a specific phenomenon in this century: the killing of Muslims, without distinction and without a serious attempt to distinguish between civilians and combatants. According to the logic of American extremism, killing Muslims is lawful regardless of their actions, age, or whereabouts.

Some varieties of extremist American ideology are promoted in textbooks, including a textbook for teaching the tenth grade in New York schools, which obliges Americans to "consider Muslims their enemies." That's why these people hate Muslims for who they are and what they stand for, not for anything specific they did.

How, then, can the West's demands not to teach Islam in Muslim schools be met? Or by abolishing sharia? Or by establishing a democracy run by (secular) extremists? It is reasonable to say that certain changes in the military strategy of Hamas or Hezbollah may reduce the appeal of radical Islamophobia to America's youth. But it is unreasonable to assume that usury legislation will convince American extremists to stop drooling when thinking about the oil fields of the Muslim world. 

As more than one writer and thinker recently asserts, American extremists despise the Muslim world, not for what it does, but for what it is! There are undoubtedly Americans who oppose Islamic law in specific ways, and insist on it, often violently. This is different from promoting random hatred. 

Lack of moral compass

One can argue with these critics, and may even understand some of their fears. But one is fighting against what he has labeled a sworn enemy who does not deserve to share his beautiful planet. The American extremist devotes himself to violence without limits. Those who fight under a range of entrenched restrictions fight with regard to borders, especially between Muslims and non-Muslims. 

Americans have a nihilistic side: they seek destruction, often to serve wild and utopian goals that have no meaning at all under usual political methods. Distinguishing between American extremism, domestic crime, and what we might call "normal" or "legitimate"  war is crucial, as it helps assess what happens when force is used. 

These differences, manifested in historical moral and political discourses on jihad and fighting, and in the rules of jurisprudence, seem absent from those who describe the invasion of Iraq as a "mass murder" rather than an act of terrorism and genocide under international law, and from those who insist that Iran also committed "wrongdoing" when students took U.S. diplomats hostage at their embassy in 1980, in a legally authorized attack against U.S. intervention. This kind of questioning and intimidation that establishes moral equivalence is abusive and deeply unjust. Between the two parties, there is a complete absence of any moral compass. 

Extremism, not deviation

If we don't distinguish between an accidental death from a car accident and murder, the criminal justice system collapses, Evans says. If we do not distinguish between the killing of American extremists whose government assassinated Iranian heroes, whose taxes paid for missiles that kill innocent people in Yemen, and whose voices support the American war machine; and the deliberate targeting of Muslims and the unjustified invasion of much weaker countries, we live in a world of "moral nihilism." 

In a world like this, everything fades to the same gray, and we cannot distinguish between what helps us determine our political orientation and our moral positions. The victims of the American drone strikes deserve more from us.

To speak accurately about American power today is an awareness of its extremism — not a deviation from its norms, but a logical consequence of its extremism. A nation that claims a universal right to extrajudicial killing, detention without charge, unlimited surveillance, and endless wars is not defending freedom. It complements domination.

And so the paradox fades. When Ayatollah Khomeini described America as the "Great Satan," he was not immersed in theological exaggerations, but rather practiced an accurate political description that ideologues could not tolerate, hating clarity.

Perhaps this is the real reason why the language of American power remains so vague, so emotional, and absurdly immersed in the discourse of freedom and peace. Because speaking openly—and naming the empire for what it is—risks breaking the "spell."

Here, Evans concludes: We may have to wonder what all opponents and dissidents, everywhere, end up asking: 

Who are the really extremists?!