"Militant" = Terrorist

Nelson Ascher, for those of you who don’t know, is a Brazillian journalist based in Paris who also writes in English at his blog called Europundits. He speaks, reads and writes, gosh, I don’t know how many languages. He is also a poet and a professional translator. He has forgotten more about languages than I have ever learned with my quarter-knowledge of Spanish and my minimal understanding of Arabic.
So when he writes about words and languages, as he often does, I pay attention. Today he posted an interesting essay about the mainstream media’s use of euphemisms for “terrorist,” such as “militant,” “rebel,” and even “dissident.” I’ve always figured the use of such words, especially “dissident,” unintentionally slanders the likes of the French Resistance, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Those people do not deserve to be lumped in with the likes of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Baathist dead-enders.
Anyway, Nelson Ascher thinks the use of these euphemisms isn’t working as the media intends because it simply changes the meaning of the euphemisms themselves. That goes hand in hand with what I’ve always thought, but he takes it a step further. Those of you who cringe (as I do) when a gang of thugs who cut off the heads of innocents are called anything other than terrorists are encouraged to read what he has to say.

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