“The problem with you Americans is that you don’t believe in evil.”

The charge is taken from a work of fiction, but it’s altogether true in fact.

That sentence appears in Joel C. Rosenberg’s 2002 novel, The Last Jihad. Rosenberg is a Messianic-Jewish writer and political strategist. He puts the words in the mouth of the fictitious former director of the Israeli Mossad speaking to the head of an FBI Counter Terrorism unit based in Israel.

The two characters are talking about Saddam Hussein’s role in the conflicts in the Middle East. The American position regarded Hussein as either crazy or an habitual liar. The Israeli understanding, born from Hitler’s holocaust, recognized that evil was a more accurate explanation for Hussein’s behavior.

Rosenberg has correctly assessed the American disregard of evil. In the atheistic framework of modern American thought, morality is relative. The concept and language of sin has been purged from the nation. The notion of real evil is a non-starter; moral language has no place in American conversation. Saddam Hussein might be crazy, sick or a chronic liar, but to describe him as evil is to speak nonsense.

An Israeli, on the other hand, looking at the same man and events, sees evil.  Thus Rosenberg’s statement comes from the mouth of the fictitious Israeli Mossad director.

Words such as “evil,” and the concepts they carry, matter. Words have power. When we attempt to erase words from the public vocabulary, consequences follow. We see this in the blindness of the current US administration which seems to believe that terrorists will go away if we stop using the term.

President Obama and his Department of Homeland Security have worked to remove the word “terrorism” from the American lexicon.  Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano replaced “terrorism” with “man-caused disasters.” The former indicated (primarily) Islamists who attack innocent populations of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secularists. A “man-caused disaster” might be so-called global warming, or the collapse of a shabbily constructed apartment building.

This language shift spawned two adverse results. It fused all non-Muslim violence with Islamist actions, thus diluting consciousness of uniquely Islamist terrorism. Another consequence was the elimination of the term “terrorism” from the American vocabulary. Thus was lost an essential category for national discussion and action.

To abandon the word terrorism was to refocus the national attention away from a particular threat: Jihadism. The US disengaged from the “fight against terrorism,” while the Jihadists continue their relentless march of mayhem and evil through the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Their intent is to create a global caliphate – a one-world state under Sharia law headed by a political-religious leader known as a caliph.

The word “terrorist” has been banned by a government that denies the reality of evil.

The latest Jihadist installment is the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a Sunni Jihadist group marked by extreme violence: words fail to capture the continued escalation of brutality and inhumanity we are witnessing. ISIS, in sweeping out of Syria, has obliterated the border between Syria and Iraq as the first installment of destroying the notion of modern political states in favor of a borderless caliphate. But we cannot call ISIS terrorists because the word has been banned from the nation’s vocabulary by a government that denies the reality of evil.

Here’s another consequence of the elimination of the word evil: a rise in the frequency of Holocaust denials.

Temple University Adjunct Professor Alessio Lerro recently argued that Jews are exaggerating the extent of the Holocaust to obtain political advantages. Dr. Arthur R. Butz, associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, is a Holocaust denier. See his article here.

In a free society, people may speak their minds. They may hold positions that are not true. They may even attempt to rewrite history. But when a nation denies the reality of evil, what outcomes might occur?

“The problem with you Americans is that you don’t believe in evil.”

–          Darrow Miller

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