Barack Obama has an aversion to labeling people who attack America in the name of Islam as terrorists. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, on March 2 when President Obama made his brief appearance before the White House press corps to speak about the two U.S. airmen killed and two wounded at the Frankfurt airport in Germany, “he talked about it as if it was like a bus accident, a tragedy.” As he did following the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, and other recent incidents, he couldn’t bring himself to call the attacker a terrorist. How can the President of the United States successfully lead America in a war against terrorists if he refuses to accept them for what they are?

Speaking the day after Obama’s statement on the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Krauthammer continued, “It is incomprehensible why he cannot even say out loud this could have been a jihadist attack, part of the war on terror.” Indeed, the suspect, 21-year-old Kosovar Muslim Arif Uka, who cried "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) as he fired his pistol, admitted he was motivated by U.S. military attacks in Afghanistan after he was detained by German authorities.

The most often heard reason given by President Obama’s critics for his aversion to labeling people like Nidal Hassan and Arif Uka as terrorists is the President's desire to reach out to the Muslim world—he doesn’t want to give Muslims the impression that the U.S. is at war with Islam. This explanation also appeals to those that believe Obama sympathizes with Muslims because of his family ties and the time he spent in Indonesia.

From the President’s June 2009 Cairo speech onward, his outreach to Muslims has been a prominent feature of his administration’s foreign policy, but does it adequately explain why he steadfastly avoids labeling individuals who attack Americans in the name of Islam as terrorists?

Barack Obama’s attitudes toward Islam, formed during his childhood, may indeed play a role in how he views acts of terrorism committed by its followers. There is another explanation, however, and one that reflects Obama’s deep-seated liberal philosophy, formed as a student at Columbia and Harvard Universities and as a community organizer in Chicago—bastions of liberal-elite thinking.

Liberals see terrorism and terrorists as a criminal-justice problem, and liberal criminologists view crime as predominantly the result of proximate and external influences rather than internal cultural and behavioral factors. They see criminals as principally the product of socially-excluded and economically-marginalized segments of society. Reducing poverty, increasing educational opportunities, and community activism are the keys to reducing crime. Rehabilitation, rather than hard and unflinching punishment, is the answer to reducing recidivism.

It’s not that liberal criminology theory is without some merit. There are many underlying causes of crime in America. It’s that these theories are of marginal utility in understanding what motivates Muslim fanatics and jihadists driven by culture, religion and ideology; and it’s the failure to accept this difference that causes liberals to view individuals who commit acts of terrorism as a criminal justice problem. It’s a closed loop.

The very concept of terrorism runs counter to liberal-elite, relativist thinking. Terrorism is a black and white distinction used by "intellectually-inferior" conservatives who believe that terrorism is terrorism. There is no middle ground. Terrorists are motivated by religion and ideology. All terrorists are bad. They should be killed or locked up and the key thrown away. Calling someone a terrorist leaves no room for blaming social, economic, or political conditions for the individual’s behavior. They’re just plain evil. Liberals, on the other hand, accept the idea that the collective victims of crime and terrorism—the society of which they are a part—are in some measure the cause of the crimes committed against them.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley’s awkward attempt to answer a reporter’s question about whether the Frankfurt incident was a terrorist attack reflects this liberal thinking that dominates the Obama administration. Refusing to describe the shootings as terrorism, Crowley responded; “Was the shooting of Gabby Giffords a terrorist attack?" Like Jared Loughner, the paranoid psychotic without a political motive who shot Giffords, Uka was a lone gunman. Lone gunmen are criminals. How, therefore, could Uka be a terrorist?

Of course, administration spokespeople and the President of the United States shouldn’t jump to a conclusion until all the facts are known. But neither the President nor Crowley needed to say that the Frankfurt incident was a terrorist attack, only that it might have been, or that they were concerned that it might have been. After all, this was an attack by a Muslim man on American military personnel overseas. They should have at least demonstrated that they were open to the possibility that Uka could be a terrorist.

Arguing that President Obama’s attitudes toward individuals who commit acts of terrorism principally is the result of his desire to reach out to the Islamic world obscures a bigger, more serious problem. Liberal elites refuse to accept the cultural, religious, and ideological causes of terrorism. They see terrorism through the criminologist’s perspective, not the war fighter's. While terrorists see themselves as warriors in a holy cause and us as the enemy, liberal-elites deal with terrorist attacks one at a time; they have no long-term war-fighting strategy.

As newly elected Representative and retired U.S. Army LTC Allen West (R. FL) noted in a recent CBS interview. "When you look at the (recently published) national security strategy, it does not talk about jihadism, does not talk about Islamic terrorism, does not talk about Muslim extremism--as a matter of fact, it talks more about global warming and climate change.” Obama's aversion to labeling people as terrorists is about much more than political correctness or his outreach to Muslims. It's about the liberal-elite mindset.