A Most Disingenuous Use of Words

Mourning the death of 40 of victims shot down over Ukraine.

The early efforts by Washington-on-the-Potomac to tone down the gravity of the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East by using language that minimizes the nature of those conflicts is one more clue as to the tepid leadership of this nation’s executive branch.

Words matter.  Several in particular which were in vogue until recently have completely mischaracterized violent events taking place in those two areas of the world.

The first term appeared on U.S. TV screens by some talking heads and reporters who initially called Ukrainian separatists in the pro-Russian stronghold of Donetsk “thugs.”

   
Mere thugs?  Not quite.  These are fighting men – well-equipped, armed soldiers supported and supplied by Moscow’s Vladimir Putin.  According to the CIA World Factbook, although only 17.3% of Ukrainians are of ethnic Russian descent, they are concentrated in the eastern provinces of Ukraine where trouble has been brewing for years.

In another part of the world – the Middle East – the adjective “inclusive” is another pathetic misuse of a word employed by the U.S. State Department to convince Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to admit more non-Shi’a Muslims as well as Kurds into the government in an attempt to halt the collapse of Iraq.  The term was widely repeated in newspaper accounts.

Sunni Muslims in Iraq were already chafing under the frustration of having been left without sufficient representation in the governing structure of that country.  Furthermore, Kurds in the north of Iraq have long been seeking independence from Baghdad.

By the time that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flew to the Middle East to convince al-Maliki to become politically more “inclusive,” it was already too late.

As Kerry was making his case to al-Nouri, the forces of jihadist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were already marching in a blitzkrieg-like advance from eastern Syria into the northwestern region of Iraq.

Al Baghdadi successfully conquered the region and promptly declared it a Caliphate to be governed under his version of Sharia law.  He has since ordered all non-Muslims to convert or to leave the newly-formed Islamic State under penalty of death.

The word “inclusive” is not in the vocabulary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

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