Mujahideen

What if you saw these guys driving down the street in your general direction? These are our allies.   They help protect both us and our Iraqi friends.   We should not judge only by appearances.

We should also be careful with words.   Mujahideen, for example, is a term that to most Muslims means a hero.  The guys in the picture are probably Mujahideen, fighting as they are against the terrorists, who sometimes call themselves Mujahideen.   The more apt word for the terrorists like Al Qaeda, however, is takfiri, which is the bigoted kind of guy who kills Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

All this is more than a semantic difference.   We should not falsely honor bad guys by calling them Mujahideen or Jihadis, nor should we dishonor these terms by associating them with terrorists.  That is what the bad guys want.  If a group of low life Americans took to calling themselves “true patriots” would we feel constrained to use that term ourselves when describing them?