“H.R. McMaster Breaks With Administration on Views of Islam”

Doug Ealy and one of my sons (himself a former Navy nuclear officer) called my attention to this item:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/hr-mcmaster-trump-islam.html?smid=fb-share

I mentioned on my blog the other day that I was very pleased with Mr. Trump’s selection (after two misfires) of Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as his national security advisor.  Dr. McMaster — he holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — represents the kind of scholar-warrior for whom I have enormous personal respect, bordering on awe.  (He is, by the way, the author of a 1997 book entitled Dereliction of Duty, which criticizes the actions of high-ranking U.S. military leadership during the Vietnam War.  I like this, because it shows independence of mind.)

And I’m even happier now, having seen this article.

I’m not absolutely opposed to referring to Islamic terrorism or Islamist terrorism.  Many recent terrorist movements have obviously emerged from Islamic soil.  Moreover, it’s a distortion to say, as some do, that they have “nothing to do with Islam.”  They use Islamic terminology, after all.  They frame their arguments in more or less Islamic terms.  They cannot be fully understood apart from their Islamic context.  But it’s also a distortion to suggest that they somehow represent “true Islam” or that they’re the inevitable logical outgrowth of Qur’anic teaching.  They’re perversions of Islam.  But a perversion of x is, obviously, related to x, and this can’t be forgotten.  Mr. Obama, I think, went too far in that direction.  Mr. Trump’s tendency, and that of some in his administration — most notably the one-time national security advisor Michael Flynn and the Trump regime’s troubling éminence grise, Steve Bannon — is to go too far in the opposite direction.