The wisdom in Trump’s calling terrorists "losers"

Inadvertently or not, Trump landed on a plain-spoken stinging moniker that happens to be true. No matter how many people the next Salman Abedi ends up killing, theocratic dead-enders are losers in every societal, ideological and historical sense.

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Now, it’s debatable whether it matters very much to would-be terrorists what unpleasant names Trump has in store for them. How we talk about terrorism, on the other hand, is important. Over the past eight years (at least), the topic has been obscured by clinical euphemisms and feel-good platitudes for the sake of winning hearts and minds. How’s that going?

Leaders in Western nations have gone out of their way to craft rhetoric that circumvents Islam completely when speaking about terrorism. We’re hooked on platitudes, such as “man-caused disaster,” treating terrorism as some kind of spontaneous criminal event, rather than a tactic used predominately by one ideology.

At the same time, the left has been transforming tolerance into a creed that means accepting illiberalism.

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