It depends upon what your definition of is is

Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker is way ahead of the curve. Listen to what he was saying way back last January re the press's fear of calling a terrorist a terrorist: "With the press and education establishments largely in the hands of leftists, the American vernacular has become a weapon wielded by the left." The debate has now come home to roost at the New York Times with David Brooks' latest op ed, "Cult of Death," not to mention Daniel Pipes' latest in the New York Sun, "They're Terrorists -- Not Activists." Excerpts from Thomas's January post:

The American Thinker believes in calling things by their proper names. Euphemism is a tool of misrepresentation and ultimately of control, stripping away accurate and evocative connotations, and substituting false associations. George Orwell wrote eloquently of the political importance of controlling language.

"The Rectification of Names" is a term familiar to all historians of China, reflecting one of the essential precepts of Confucianism. Confucius, one of the greatest political thinkers in the history of the world, taught that if names are not correct, words will be misused, and when words are misused, nothing can be on a sound footing. Political reformers of corrupt dynasties often crusaded under the political banner of The Rectification of Names.

Any realistic understanding of not only the Palestinian suicide killers, but also the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Al Qaeda mass murderers who hijacked our airliners and flew them into buildings, should begin with an understanding that we are dealing with a death cult.

Therefore, The American Thinker proposes that in the future, we should call those who attach explosives to themselves, those who hijack airplanes to crash them, and those who [God forbid!] carry biological or nuclear weapons into our cities and unleash them, by their proper name: "death cult killers."

"Death cult" never took amongst the multilateralist moral equivalency community, of course -- we've blogged to the choir about that here early and often -- but Thomas may have been prophetic. This from Daniel Pipes yesterday:

The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists:

Comments

[The Prop]

Keep in mind the criticism Israel has taken for refusing to call Palestinian terrorists anything else BUT "terrorists". On the other side of the spectrum the Guardian's reporters are supposedly banned from using that term at all, ever, except in direct quotes.

Orwell had it right: ban the word and you ban the concept.

I prefer using the term "terrorist", although I am open-minded. If you want to call them "psychopaths", "crazed killers", "mad dogs" or simply "target practice", fine.