“Islam is a ‘malignant cancer’: The hateful rhetoric of Trump’s new national security adviser”

I’m not a fan of “political correctness.”  I think that Barack Obama’s failure to be clear about the threat poised by extremist political Islam has been detrimental to American policy.  I favor candid speech.

But I want it to be accurate, to the maximum extent possible.

And the link below was supplied to me by a person who leans strongly leftward (even hard leftward), so I don’t take it as the final word on this matter:

Islam is a “malignant cancer”: The hateful rhetoric of Trump’s new national security adviser

And this item, too, was written from a left-leaning perspective that I don’t share:

“Michael Flynn will be a disaster as National Security Adviser”

But I’m wary.  This appointment bears watching.

Extremist political Islam represents a danger to the Muslim world, first and foremost, but it’s also a threat to the rest of us.

However, it’s imperative that we not confuse Islam as such with the extremist ideologies that operate under its name — ideologies that often owe as much to fascist and Marxist antecedents as to the Prophet Muhammad and the classical jurists, theologians, and philosophers of the Islamic tradition.  To make that mistake would be to play (dangerously) into the hands of the extremists who badly want this to be a war to the death between “Islam” and “the West.”  If we wrongly begin to see it that way ourselves, we make their dream real and we run the risk of alienating and radicalizing many, many more of the world’s roughly 1.5 billion Muslims.

If Michael Flynn truly believes that Islam itself is a “cancer,” if he actually regards it as a political ideology that merely masquerades as a religion (an unspeakably stupid and historically bogus idea), if he fails, even occasionally, to distinguish between extremist Islamists and ordinary Muslims — and, please recall, it’s ordinary Muslims who have been, overwhelmingly, the victims of those extremist Islamists — he could do incalculable damage to the United States and to the world, both in the advice that he’ll be giving to an uninformed and unthoughtful president and in the image of the United States that he’ll furnish to Muslims and others around the globe.

Could a Secretary of State Romney work with such a National Security Advisor?  Maybe not.  Or perhaps Mr. Romney might be able to domesticate him a bit, or at least to mitigate the harm he might do.

These are difficult waters.