Terrorism, pogrom, genocide: Naming reality — or manipulating it?

French columnist Sophia Aram recently devoted a column in Le Point (September 3, 2026) to what she called a form of “lexical capitulation”: the strange contemporary tendency to shy away from certain words precisely when they ought to be used.

The use of the word “terrorism” is perhaps the most striking example she cites in support of her argument.

Ahead of the anniversary of 9/11, she noted that CBC/Radio-Canada had reminded its journalists to avoid directly describing the attacks as “terrorist,” on the grounds that such a politically charged term might compromise journalistic neutrality. That same week in France, far-left European lawmaker Rima Hassan sparked controversy after sharing a tribute to Kozo Okamoto, one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, and taking part in a parliamentary roundtable questioning not only France’s offense of glorifying terrorism, but the broader counterterrorism framework — even the very concept of terrorism itself.

And since October 7, parts of the Western activist world have displayed remarkable semantic ingenuity in avoiding certain words whenever they risk making reality too uncomfortable for particular audiences: terrorism becomes “resistance,” a massacre becomes an “operation,” and the deliberate murder of civilians an expression of “anti-colonial struggle.”

Paradoxically, Israel is home to an opposite tendency — an almost self-flagellating impulse to overstate our own failings, turning every excess into a historical symptom, every act of violence into “terror,” every riot into a “pogrom.”

While some stubbornly resist using the word terrorism when Israel is its victim, others deploy it with remarkable ease when it serves to morally criminalize the Israeli Right.

This is how the notion of “Jewish terrorism” gradually took hold in Israel — and almost immediately abroad — to describe violence committed by a small radicalized fringe of young Jews in Judea and Samaria.

Let us begin with what should be beyond dispute.

Such unjustifiable violence exists. It is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)