January 27th, 2005
Paul Mirengoff says that we should take Islamists at their word. I agree.
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I thought the Islamists were pretty convincing when they said “We love death more than you love life.”
REPLY
Paul Mirengoff says that we should take Islamists at their word. I agree.
I thought the Islamists were pretty convincing when they said “We love death more than you love life.”
Bizarro Jack January 28, 2005 at 5:16 pm
I must say I’m a little concerned that the term “Islamist” is not clear enough to casual readers. On C-Span and most other news programs that I listen to, I usually hear it spelled out as something long like “Radical Islamic Fundamentalism/ists,” where there is clarity that not all muslims want us dead or under the rule of tyrants.I am not trying to be like that guy who got mad when he heard someone say “niggardly” — I know that it’s not the same word as “muslim”, but the word is young enough that we can still think about trying to keep it from getting cemented into the language. It will just confuse children and casual followers of the news for decades to come.I don’t have the OED on hand (I would love to know when “islamist” started to mean “islamic fundamentalist”), but it would seem that the confusion is already out there – http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=islamistAt the time of my reading, the first entry supports your usage, and the latter entry describes a synonym for “muslim”.