Radical Islamic terrorism is a popular term used by President Trump, a term that former President’s Obama and Bush rightfully refused to use.

The reason is simple: describing terrorism as radical Islamic terrorism implies that the whole religion of Islam is founded in terrorism.

This is because the word Islam describes the entire religion, while Muslim describes a person practicing the religion. Therefore, calling someone an extremist Muslim would be more accurate, yet it would still polarize the Islamic religion.

Trump, however, believes if we don’t use Radical Islamic Terrorism it makes us weak and is politically correct nonsense. His new national security advisor H.R McMaster, who has past military experience in the Middle East, was in opposition against Trump in saying that the term hurts U.S interests.

“The phrase is unhelpful because terrorist organizations like ISIS represent a perversion of Islam, and are thus un-Islamic,” said McMaster at a National Security meeting reported by CNN.
The use of the term is offensive, feeding into the idea that all terrorists are Muslim tricking people into thinking that terrorists represent the religion.

Trump has been reported saying he wants radical Islamic terrorists out of the U.S, which encourages hostility towards Muslims, since most people don’t understand the difference between extremist beliefs and actual beliefs of Islam, mostly due to this type rhetoric.

The simple replacement for the term would be Islamist extremism; it isolates terrorists so everyone knows that they do not represent the whole religion.

Not only would that help with views towards Muslims, it would also help our relations with Muslim majority countries, a relationship we need to fight terrorism. We need distinctions between Islam and extremist groups to not only fight against extremist groups, but also decrease the rates of hate crimes.

Politician’s on both sides refusal to use the word is not weakness, it is intelligence in the fact that he understood the effects of his words, something Trump does not.