The Obama administration is once again hearing the criticism that President Obama and his advisors and spokesmen, in an attempt to avoid offending Islamists, are self-censoring their use of the term “Islamic” to the point of absurdity. And the criticism is correct.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Obama administration has decided that self-censorship is a more comfortable fit for this president than intellectual honesty or defending the West. Obama would make a great editor of the New York Times, but at this moment the free world could really use a leader. Unfortunately, his reaction has been twofold: to pretend he knows anything about Islam and declare many Muslims to be fake Muslims, and to stop using the term “Islamic” when describing things involving Islam.

It has made for some awkward moments. Although the president is the one who sets the tone, it’s the spokesmen who have to go out everyday and express these amateurish notions on camera. On Monday, it was State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf’s turn. The administration will be holding a summit on the generic threat of violent extremism instead of the obvious and immediate and ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism, and Fox’s Martha MacCallum asked her a pretty fair question:

MACCALLUM: Tell me, what other forms of extremism are particularly troubling and compelling to you right now?

HARF: Well, look, there are people out there who want to kill other people in the name of a variety of causes. Of course, Martha, we are most focused on people doing this in the name of Islam. And we’ve talked about with ISIL, part of our strategy to counter this extremism is to have other moderate Muslim voices stand up and say they don’t represent our religion. They speak for their religion more than we do certainly and we need those voices to stand up. In addition to all the other efforts we’re undertaking.

Harf was asked to name another kind of extremism vexing the administration. She wouldn’t. Only Islam. So, the administration can then at least address the fact that radical Islam poses a threat, right? Wrong. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, as the Washington Times reported (via Hot Air), explained why administration officials will not be using “Islam” when Islam is involved unless the actions meet the administration’s guidelines for Koranic faithfulness:

“I certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position where I’m repeating the justification they have cited that I think is illegitimate. They had invoked Islam to justify their attacks,” he told reporters. “I think what I’m trying to do is to describe to you what happened and what they did. These individuals are terrorists. … We have chosen not to use that label [of radical Islam] because it doesn’t seem to accurately describe what happened.”

From the administration’s perspective, then, here is what happened in Paris: angry, boom, yelling, bang, very bad. Is that a sufficiently clear description? Do the administration’s genius advisors think scribbling pictures on the wall of a cave would be safer? Is there a single adult anywhere in the White House?

On a more serious note, this is a problem not just for clearly incompetent officials in Washington but also for scholars. The most maddening element of Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence is that it combines fluid writing and broad scholarship with glaring errors whenever history doesn’t conform to Armstrong’s thesis. And as is so often the case, that tends to happen when modern-day Islamic terror confounds the narrative.

Armstrong sets out to make an important, if anodyne and pedestrian, point: you cannot judge the prospective violence of a government or a people by whether they are “religious” or “secular.” Both can be, and have been, peaceful; both can be, and have been, violent. Much of the book is a fascinating exploration of just how intertwined religion and politics have always been, even when the politics appear, or try to appear, secular. Modern society, she writes, “has made a scapegoat of faith.”

But when we get to the latter half of the 20th century, Armstrong tries to show that Islam isn’t the cause of violence it’s being made out to be. And so we get this remarkable passage about Hezbollah:

By 1986, however, the resistance leaders had decided that Hizbollah must change direction, since its operations were too often irresponsible and counterproductive; it was suffering heavy casualties and dividing the Shii community. There was tension between Hizbollah and AMAL, and the villages resisted Hizbollah’s attempts to impose Islamic rules. By this time Fadl Allah had concluded that violence, after all, did not bring results: What had the PLO achieved with the terrorism that had shocked the world? Lebanese Shii must take a new path, he argued, working “from within the objective and actual circumstances” in which they found themselves. …

Hizbollah, therefore, renounced terrorism and became a political party answerable to the electorate, focusing on social activism and a grassroots transformation.

Holy moly. Does it even need to be pointed out that Hezbollah engages in global terrorism outside of Lebanon and rules in southern Lebanon by force? If you have to argue that Hezbollah is basically a group of community organizers-turned-legislators, you should probably rethink the point you’re trying to make.

Elsewhere, we get this: “Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO).”

Even on its most secular days (which are far, far behind us), the PLO’s terrorism was still directed at the Jews in the hope of extinguishing the Jewish state. It is quite a stretch to describe any such terror as secular.

It is comforting to believe that the world is not a complicated place–that it’s divided between extremists and non-extremists, and that religion or other ideologies we either respect or adhere to are wholly on the right side of that dividing line. But the truth, as always, is more complex. And we do ourselves no favors by pretending otherwise.

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