WASHINGTON – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police disavowed its own anti-terrorism handbook, but the U.S. State Department is apparently endorsing it.

The guide instructs, “Do not refer to terrorists as ‘jihadis’” and speaks glowingly of the concept of jihad as “peaceful” and “noble.”

The Mounties cited the handbook’s “adversarial tone” in ordering its officers to disregard it on Tuesday.

The Washington Free Beacon reported, the very next day, the State Department posted a tweet promoting the handbook on its anti-terrorism Twitter feed called, “Think Again Turn Away.”

The tweet read: “Canada: handbook to help parents understand extremists, combat recruitment.”

The State Department claimed the tweet was not an endorsement.

Spokeswoman Carolyn Glassman told the paper, “CSCC (Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications) was simply sharing information about a new product related to counterterrorism. Our reposting does not connote an endorsement.”

However, the State Department tweet also included a link to an article extolling the virtues of the handbook.

The “United Against Terrorism” handbook was published by the Canadian Muslim community with input from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP.

But just one day after the handbook was officially released, the Mounties announced they would not distribute it to officers and issued a statement reading, “After a final review of the handbook, the RCMP could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet and therefore directed RCMP Manitoba not to proceed with this initiative.”

The guide advises Muslims they do not have to cooperate with authorities investigating terrorism and, if they do, they should have a lawyer present.

When asked why the State Department would promote a handbook that claims jihadis are not at war with the United States, Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, told WND, “This is just another example of the Obama administration not taking seriously a potential threat to the United States.”

“It makes you wonder if anyone’s in charge at the White House,” he added.

The handbook doesn’t just recommend against calling jihadis terrorists, it speaks glowingly of the concept of jihad.

Under the caption, “Is jihad the same as terrorism? Absolutely Not!,” the guide states, “Jihad is an Arabic term meaning striving, struggling and exertion in the path of good.”

But by way of explanation, the handbook then somewhat confusingly recognizes the Prophet Muhammad referred to both one’s inner struggle and warfare as types of jihad, by quoting him as saying: “We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the greater jihad,” what the guide called, “the far more vital and crucial task of extinguishing transgression from one’s own society and one’s own heart.”

The handbook further claimed, “Jihad is not holy war either. Islam allows for jihad in the form of a military action in self-defense only.”

However, Osama bin Laden himself claimed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were waged in self-defense, and Islamic terrorists themselves readily and uniformly acknowledge they are engaging in jihad.

Nonetheless, the handbook instructs, “By equating terrorism with jihad and by calling terrorist ‘jihadis,’ the media, law enforcement, intelligence agencies and politicians have confused the discourse, and this has been counterproductive in challenging the extremist narrative in the minds of the young and vulnerable.”

The handbook appears to strive to separate all terrorists from any association with Islam, and any religious motivation, stating, “Jihad is not terrorism; terrorists are criminals, not martyrs.”

In fact, the handbook instructs law enforcement officers to refrain from “questioning individuals’ religiosity.”

Not only does the guide instruct intelligence and law enforcement officials to “avoid terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism,’ ‘Islamicism,’ and ‘Islamic extremism,’” it recommends such terms as “al Qaida inspired extremist.”

Mideast expert Clare Lopez of the Center for Security Policy agreed with some of that, but for different reasons.

She told WND, “I avoid terms like ‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamist’ because I’ve never seen any authoritative source, Muslim or otherwise, that can coherently describe the difference between doctrinal Islam and ‘Islamism,’ or a devout, faithful Muslim and an ‘Islamist.’

Lopez said her “more accurate terms” would be Islam, Muslim and jihadi, “[W]ith the latter being those Muslims whose devotion extends to active involvement in any aspect of jihad – defined in Islamic law as ‘warfare against non-Muslims’ – be it violent, pre-violent or non-violent … or noble, which of course, is exactly how a devout Muslim would view jihad.”

The battle over semantics has been a growing front in the war on terror in recent years, one that has experts such as Lopez questioning which side the administration favors.

She told WND in August it was the Obama administration “that actively purged truthful curriculum about the inspirational relationship between Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture and Islamic terrorism.”

Clare Lopez of the Center for Security Policy

In fact, she said, they were told what to purge by groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and even allowed some of those same groups to supervise the purge. All of that, she observed, “would seem to indicate certain knowledge about the Islamic threat, and a determined effort to ignore that threat.”

By 2014, she maintained, U.S. leadership had purged all its training curriculum and official discourse of any terminology that would accurately identify the Islamic enemy, “and the time was right. Al-Qaida receded and [ISIS] arose. The U.S. couldn’t tell the difference between jihadist militias to save its life anyway, quite literally.”

Complicating matters for those trying to figure what the administration’s true position is on jihadis, Obama had declared there no longer was a global war on terror. And that was where he and Lopez, a former CIA officer, veered in entirely different directions.

Speaking to WND in August, she named the enemy as jihadis and stated the goal should be their destruction.

“Above all, we must acknowledge that the enemy is supremacist forces of Islamic jihad,” Lopez told WND. “We must name, acknowledge, confront the enemy as he is – not as we wish him to be.”

She scoffed at the notion that what others call radical Islam was a “defeated ideology.”

“Oh? What ideology is that?” she asked. “The 1,400-year-old one that’s already made mincemeat out of six or seven major world empires? That one?”

Lopez explained what she thought was Obama’s real goal: Far from seeking the defeat of jihadism in the Mideast or globally, Obama preferred to let Sunni and Shiite jihadists each have their own spheres of influence in the Muslim world and America should withdraw its troops and influence from the region.

Lopez said the ISIS crisis had forced a reluctant Obama to call for airstrikes.

On Wednesday, she added this parting observation: “The definition of ‘terrorism’ in Islamic law, by the way, is the killing of a Muslim without right.”