For more than three decades, they have sought out and killed Americans. In 1983, in one of the first major anti-American attacks, they bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. In 1992, they used bombs to kill two people in Aden, Yemen, in hopes of killing American troops that might be passing through. In February 1993, they used a truck-based explosive to try and topple the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. They failed, but their attack killed six New Yorkers and injured a thousand others.

What would you call the perpetrators of such acts—militants? Would you copy President Obama and call them violent extremists or simply terrorists? What is missing in such formulations? Even as he identified al-Qaeda as a threat to America, Obama refused to describe the enemy as it describes itself: “Islamic.”

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