by Steven R. Corman There has been some dispute in our little corner of the blogosphere lately about whether strategic communication is a good term for describing the government’s efforts to communicate strategically.  Matt Armstrong commented on this in the course of reviewing the latest plan from the DoD to get their strategic communication house [...]

by Steven R. Corman Jeffrey Imm over at CT Blog did a post yesterday admiring Rep. Hoekstra’s attempt to amend H.R. 5959 to deny DHS and NCTC the ability to expend any funds in their efforts to discourage use of words like “jihad” in U.S. strategic communication. The amendment was defeated, but passed and 249 [...]

by Steven R. Corman During my usual media grazing I ran across an article published yesterday in Aljazeera Magazine by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, in the “reviews” section. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be reviewing, but on the surface it has something to do with language and the word “islamofascism,” and I am on record [...]

by Steven R. Corman The latest entry in the war of language comes from Jim Guirard of the TrueSpeak Institute writing today at Small Wars Journal Blog. Guirard is one of the earliest and most persistent arguers against using the word “jihadi” to describe the Bad Guys, a position we here at COMOPS have also [...]

by Emy Matesan Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s first visit to Germany in the beginning of February illustrates the “Islamic dilemma” Western European countries currently face. In front of a predominantly German audience, Erdogan had emphasized the need to better integrate the Turkish minority. He stunned Chancellor Angela Merkel when he suggested that Germany [...]

by Steven R. Corman Last week I noted that the U.S. had decided to stop calling the Bad Guys “jihadis.”  Well as Jeffrey Imm over at CT Blog points out, there’s just one little problem:   Apparently the State Department and the President didn’t get that memo.  Imm details 30 uses of the word or [...]

by Steven R. Corman After years of being told over and over again that they should stop calling the Bad Guys “jihadis” the U.S. Government has finally decided that this would be a good idea. I feel sure it was two posts on COMOPS Journal, here and here, that finally did the trick. AP reports [...]

by Steven R. Corman Back in September I did a post arguing that we should quit calling the Bad Guys jihadis because this helps construct them as religious actors, and start calling them something else, like islamists. Last week Menahem Milson did a post on MEMRI that gives a nice synopsis of the word jihad [...]