Just now during dinner, the Fox News text display (above the crawler but below the picture) talked about "radical Muslim extremists" and "radical Muslim terrorists." I guess if one adjective doesn't seem to do the job, use two to make sure folks know the critters are weely, weely out there.
How many radical moderates are there? How many moderate extremists are there? How many mainstream terrorists are there? How can you tell a moderate terrorist from a radical terrorist (other than the moderate's lack of bomb-making equipment after the bomb-show loophole is closed)?
At least Fox isn't afraid to use the words Muslim or Islamic. When I googled for "radical extremist" this shows up, a seemingly scholarly journal article on "Al Qaeda and like-minded groups."
As the United States continues to fight on multiple fronts to disrupt the efforts of al Qaeda and its affiliates, the U.S. government has slowly come to realize that military force alone cannot defeat radical Islamist extremism (hereafter “radical extremism”).1 Today, there is a growing consensus that countering the ideology that drives this extremism is a critical element in the overall effort to prevent extremist acts of violence.
They dropped the I-bomb once and left "radical extremism." Is mere extremism a Salafi or Wahabi back-to-basics version of Islam and radical extremism a weaponized version of Islamist extremism? Or are the Salafis radical Islamists and the jihadis are the radical Islamists weaponized.
The article notes a couple of “Conveyor Belt Groups" Tabligh Jamaat (which is an Indian-based Muslim-pietist grouping) and Hizb al-Tahrir (a Muslim-supremacist group that has seems more politicized than TJ) that get folks longing for a caliphate and are something of a rhetorical gateway drug to jihadism.
However. radical and extreme are verbal kissing cousins. Doubling up on them doesn't help much unless they have a particular meaning for that situation.
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