Eric Demolli wrote:
I'm for a very careful use of the word "terrorist" : "X is a a terrorist"... "X was a terrorist" is more acceptable IMO. The 9/11 hijackings is terrorism, no doubt about it. Having wrote this we can spend a long time arguing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki or even Dresden.
I suppose my position on this is that I'd rather use the words "terrorist" and similarly-loaded words like "murder" as little as possible, because they add only opinionated connotation, and not really any factual information.
Consider: * A group of Al-Qaeda terrorists crashed a plane into the World Trade center, murdering 3500 civilians. * Members of the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda crashed a plane into the World Trade center, killing 3500 civilians.
They contain the same information, but the second one is much more neutral, IMO, without being at all conciliatory. I think we ought to just present facts, and in many cases the facts alone are enough to damn those people who many of us would like to condemn, so we don't need to do so explicitly.
I think we should even apply this to cases like concentration camps. Most of our concentration camp articles talk about how many people were "murdered" there, which reads strangely to me. It reads like the author was trying to make a point, not neutrally imparting information. I'd prefer to say how many people were "killed" there, which hardly condones the killings either.
I do think we can use "terrorist" especially when it's informative, just not when we're trying to make it descriptive. For example, it should be mentioned that the Sept. 11 attacks touched off large-scale fear of terrorism in the US, and a "war on terrorism", and so on.
-Mark