A plea for clarity from Robert Spencer: Jihad: The Real Terrorist Enemy.

A vote for Bush or Kerry will be a vote for or against the war on terror.

Kerry, of course, has already famously said, “I think there has been an exaggeration” of the terror threat by the Bush White House. Others on the Left go even farther, complaining that the word terrorism itself is being kept deliberately imprecise: “Few American politicians or commentators,” asserts John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer based in Saudi Arabia, in Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune, “dare to question the conventional wisdom that ‘terrorism’ is the greatest threat facing America and the world. If so, the real threat lies not in the behavior to which this word is applied but in the word itself.”

The word, Whitbeck says, “is so subjective as to be devoid of any inherent meaning” —used by Bush and Co. to justify whatever geopolitical misadventures their masters at Halliburton order them to pursue next. Whitbeck suggests that “perhaps the only honest and globally workable definition of ‘terrorism’ is an explicitly subjective one — ‘violence that I don’t support.’” And, of course, the principal problem is that the U.S. is “relying on the word to assert, apparently, a right to attack any country it dislikes.”

Kerry, of course, will fix this right up. “Perhaps John Kerry,” muses Whitbeck, “will have the courage and genuine patriotism to question the wisdom of continuing to wage a perpetual ‘war’ against a subjective epithet and, by doing so, to set us free, restoring some measure of sanity and more mature and constructive priorities both to American society and to America’s relations with the world.”

Here’s the vile column by “John V. Whitbeck” to which Mr. Spencer is referring: ‘Terrorism’: A world ensnared by a word. “Whitbeck” is fond of this motif; he’s the Saudi go-to guy when they need a willing stooge to delegitimize Western efforts to fight terrorism. In March 2002, I wrote about a previous column of his, published by the Arab News, that makes exactly the same point—and was republished by the muddle-brained leftists at the Los Angeles Times.