She’s just determined to be obnoxious about it

I enjoy the work of James Taranto for his passionate attention to words and logic. This is on display in a piece in his recent column, To Spite ISIS. Under the heading Bottom Story of the Day, he reports:

“Stop Asking Me to Condemn Terrorists Just Because I’m Muslim” reads the attention-grabbing headline on a Washington Post article by Rana Elmir, deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan. The subheadline: “I have no reason to say sorry, and Islamophobes won’t believe me anyway.”

The headline writer has not done an injustice to Elmir, who in the article likewise confuses condemnation with apology, and who takes the same petulant tone. Sample:

As an American Muslim, I am consistently and aggressively asked—by media figures, religious leaders, politicians and Internet trolls—to condemn terrorism to prove my patriotism.

I emphatically refuse. . . .

Just as I have never been asked to condemn Dylann Storm Roof’s attack on parishioners of a historic black church in South Carolina, Robert Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood facility, the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or the slaughter of moviegoers in Colorado or Louisiana, I will not be bullied into condemning terror perpetrated by psychopaths who misrepresent and distort Islam for their deranged purposes.

Wait a minute. That last clause—“terror perpetrated by psychopaths who misrepresent and distort Islam for their deranged purposes”—isn’t exactly a neutral description, much less a panegyric. So it turns out she is willing to condemn Islamic terrorism. She’s just determined to be obnoxious about it.