Beware the passive voice President

Mark Steyn:

...

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl upon signing the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act. Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

Now Mr. Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. Even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Mr. Obama, it's the work of seconds because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Mr. Obama could muster none.

Even if Americans don't get the message, the rest of the world does. This week's pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently, it never captured Mr. Obama's imagination, because if it had, he never could have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" - you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever - "that captured the world's imagination."

...

The latest appropriation is that his "loss" "reminded us of how valuable a free press is." It was nothing to do with "freedom of the press." By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that about 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Shariah, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl's murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists, from Osama bin Laden to the panty bomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi." But Mr. Obama is not the kind to take "guilty" for an answer, so he's arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.

...

I mentioned last week Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s peculiar insistence that "radical Islam" had nothing to do with the Times Square bomber, the panty bomber, the Fort Hood killer. Just a lot of moments "capturing the world's imagination." For now, the jihadists seem to have ceased cutting off our heads. Listening to Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder, perhaps they've figured out there's nothing much up there anyway.

This is a brilliant piece by Steyn. Obama often uses the passive voice to avoid the obvious truth when it comes to our enemies. He certainly did it in the case of Daniel Pearl. He clearly did not want the ceremony that was to mark his death to suggest that there was something wrong with some of the followers of Islam.