Obama's address at Countering Violent Extremism summit

[SteelCurtain]

If that's what his honest intention is (thought I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that that is his intention), then fine, I can at least understand where he's coming from. I'm still of the mind that calling a spade a spade is far better in terms of clarity. And I'm not sure exactly how we're giving tacit approval by calling them Islamic; even the people who pull the "they just have the wrong interpretation of Islam" card are at least acknowledging the direct link between their actions and their explicitly stated beliefs and reasons.

To be completely honest (and I should have stated this earlier), it's the only reasonable explanation I have for this behavior, and it makes sense to me. I do not have anything from the administration stating this outright. I did think of one more, though, and that is that if he is about to launch a military effort against ISIS, he might want to establish rhetorical precedence for distancing himself from "fighting Islam" in any sense. Fighting against "radical Islam" is really close to a religious war.

I think his position makes calling a spade a spade more tricky than if you or I did it. He has to weigh the conservative media's response to everything he does. If he had called this thing radical Islam to begin with, the conservative media would have been right on the other side of things, saying he is legitimizing ISIS as representative of Islam, etc. Lesser of two evils, maybe.