Lumping diverse people into one box harms U.S. national security interests. First, as Khanna points out, it reinforces the “archaic Islamist fantasies” of Osama bin Laden and other global terror groups. The United States really shouldn’t be in the business of doing the intellectual heavy lifting of its enemies.
Exactly. Every time you use the phrase "The Muslim World" you're implicitly conceding an argument that has not been won. Don't let Islamists call it "their" "world" - which ownership is what the phrase connotes.
I'll go one further and say that all of the following usages should cease:
The Arab World. Do we speak of "the White world"? What we call "the Arab world" contains a lot of places with significant numbers of non-Arabs. Should they be expelled for being non-Arab in the supposedly "Arab" world? Or second-class citizens? No and no. The real answer is that it's not "the Arab world" in the first place. Races don't get to own/operate their own exclusive "worlds". Or they do, but we have a name for it when it happens....
"Muslim Country". What the heck is a "Muslim Country"? A country in which a majority of the people are Muslims? So what? There are plenty of countries in which the majority of people are Christian, but we don't call them "Christian Countries". This usage tacitly plays into the hands of people who would like to think that the moment they get 50%+1 of the country converted to [Religion X] - or even if they merely seize the reins of government from a minority position - some sort of switch is flipped and it immediately becomes a "[Religion X] Country". Why would we concede that at all?
Arab Land. Is the land "Arab"? What does that even mean? This plays into racialist cleansing ideology. (If it's "Arab Land" then one presumes non-Arabs don't belong on it at all, in any capacity, at least not without the say-so of "Arabs"....) In reality there's just land, and certainly some land is controlled by governments that are majority Arab. But that doesn't make it "Arab" land.
All of these tiny, innocuous-seeming, conventionally-used phrases actually embody complex arguments about human organization, governance, and ownership that (a) are controversial if not downright evil, (b) have not been won or even argued successfully at all by the people who would like their implications to gain widespread acceptance, and indeed (c) feed and serve only the ideology of our enemies.
I wish we'd stop conceding these arguments a priori.
