Most radicalized people in the Western world are not radicalized by any one event or particular thing. It is the culmination of many, many different experiences snowballing gradually until it becomes too big to stop. Hearing terms like "violent Muslims" and "sharia law" used negatively once isn't going to radicalize anyone. Hearing it hundreds of times on its own likely isn't going to radicalize anyone. However, when you stack casual and consistent usage of those terms with all of the other relatively isolated or innocent experiences - each of which on their own would not radicalize anyone - then the consequences from that aggregate can be massive.
Think about it the same way you would think about skin damage from the sun. Going out in the sun once isn't likely going to give you skin cancer. Doing it 100 times even probably won't lead to that. But start going out in the sun every day, hit the tanning beds, smoke two packs of cigarettes every day and be sure to never drink any water. No one incident likely caused it; when you go to the doctor and they find skin cancer, they're likely going to tell you that it was a combination of all of it, and that any individual instance on its own - while bad nonetheless - likely wasn't the culprit.
I don't know why this is so hard for some people to understand: the goal is to minimize the number of negative impressions made that lead vulnerable people down this path. It's not about "being PC". If you don't believe me, then go to somebody's house tomorrow and start screaming whatever "politically-incorrect" terms you'd like over and over outside. Then go back and do it the next day. And the day after that. Keep doing it. Start adding more things into your routine, and continue to escalate it. Sooner or later, something bad is going to happen to you. It wasn't any one occasion that caused it. It's the aggregate result of you being a sh**thead that caused them to snap.
Yeah, that sums up the position of the Obama administration. As a result of this thinking, we require statements made by our military people and the leadership of our allies to be scrutinized/sanitized. But I think people are getting tired of this. We seem to enjoy blaming ourselves for the problem of radical Islam, but here's a newsflash: we aren't responsible for having planes flown into our buildings, we aren't responsible for having people blow themselves up in our airports, we aren't responsible for having people shoot up our sporting events or concerts or bars. We need to understand that these people have decided that they are at
war with us, and it makes absolutely no difference what we call the struggle that's been imposed on us.
