I receive many messages from Janet Lehr who is a watchdog on things Israel, Israelis and Jews.  Today she relayed from the Jewish World Review September 7, 2004 that “They’re Terrorists – Not Activists or Victims”, an article by Daniel Pipes.  Such reports are helpful, but I think they make the same mistake over and over again. No one calls terrorists by their proper names.

Languages used by the media all over the world have avoided the term “terrorists” to describe movements and groups that are not mainline. These are possibly revolutionaries and anarchists. Euphemisms are deliberately employed to soften the actions that hurt innocents who are used as pawns in the machinations of these - well, killers and murderers. KILLERS AND MURDERERS are the proper names instead of the softer terms resorted to by the proper press and other media.

Pipes lists the euphemisms used by the major respected media as follows: “assailants, attackers, bombers, captors, commandos, criminals, extremists, fighters, group, guerrillas, gunmen, hostage-takers, insurgents, kidnappers, militants, and perpetrators”. Each of these groups take the lives of innocent bystanders who get in the way of demonstrations against present governments – killers of human lives and murderers of collateral people who just happen to be in the way – or who were chosen because so many would be there. Some believe the murderer or killer is ennobled because he or she is a deliberate suicide while killing and murdering others. In lands and districts where the killer was spawned, he or she is a martyr. Is the female “suicide” rewarded with bevy of “virgins”, one of the many unbelievable religious verities that are current today?

Many people, who believe such murderers go to heaven to be pampered by “virgins”, should learn to call things by their “proper names”.  Middle Class complacency is too concerned with how much time is taken up by having to listen to the whiners who are not doing as well as the well-off. Misnomers get off to a start and we are stuck with them.

The latest effort to make us think that the world as given us by the Bush/Cheney team is just the way it should be is to deny that any thing is wrong. The numbers of dead soldiers have gone beyond the one thousand mark and will go up even more as time goes on if we do not change our ways or leadership. I have learned that you have to listen to what is said by the dispossessed and the recently distressed. They have legitimate complaints and neither you nor I have entitlement. Misnomers, ignorant (used by the rest of us) and deliberate (by the media pretending to be the intelligentsia), should be dropped for use of proper names.