We now hear the Western media using the term "moderate Islamist." Not so long ago the one-word appellation "Islamist" was sufficient definition to cover all persons favouring Islamic terrorism as their medium of religious expression. All that has changed. Since the advent of the much-lauded Arab Spring, apparently the solitary word "Islamist" is judged to be too much of a generalization and an undeserved excoriation of the those Muslim activists who are sending, by force of arms, Muslim dictators packing.

My early way of thinking was: If they're Muslim and they inflict violence and death upon other human beings, then they're out and out Muslim terrorists. Much later, to be accommodative of Western journalism's ever-changing phraseology, I adopted the term "Islamist" in order not to distinguish the "moderate Muslim" from the Muslim who finds it necessary to kill and maim other human beings, but rather to distinguish those Muslims who kill other human beings in obedience to the leaders of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda from those Muslims who kill other human beings in the name of that elusive, Islamic-flavoured democracy, the likes of which has been already articulated by Hamas in Gaza. Killing innocent Muslims at that point in time, in the name of an Islamic-flavoured democracy, was a celebrated event for all those fools who were not Jewish nor living in the land of Israel, who should therefore not be expected to perceive the religious maleficence Hamas has by now regurgitated as a "democratic freedom."

Since that time Western journalists have introduced us to their avant-garde term "moderate Islamist." This appellation defines those Muslims who kill other Muslims but who afterwards win elections in this, the season of the Arab Spring. This kill-or-be-killed type of democracy, unique at this time to Muslim lands and Muslim people, has escaped the condemnation of most Western governments, Canadian and American included, and has even gained a measure of respectability. What gets me is that the intellectuals who conjure up these definitions as a means of exculpating religiously driven murderers from their war crimes are the same intellectuals who condemn those of us who refuse to bear silently, as succinctly described by Maimonides long ago, "the lies and absurdities of Ishmael."

One cannot employ progressive terms to extenuate for an unprogressive religion. Religion, by its very nature, is impervious to such intellectual suppliances. Just as the modern term "Christian Zionist" has never really hidden the anti-Jewish essence of Christianity, so, too, the term "moderate Islamist" will never erase the image and threat of bloodshed and violence that most Western peoples now associate with Muslims and the religion of Islam. The recent adaptation of the term "moderate Islamist" will not save the maculated reputation of Hamas who, it was reported today, have recently renounced violence and their sworn maleficence against the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. All the while this renunciation was being discussed by their leadership, Hamas' constituents were firing AK47s into the air and shouting "Death to the Jews!"

Western journalists must keep in mind that the "masterminds" (another term invented by Western journalists) in charge of terrorist entities like Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, are not the Muslims who suit up with the bomb belts and blow themselves up in market squares and military convoys. Rather, it is the common Muslim toiling under the authority of these same leaders who is actually sacrificing his life and his/her family's future. For these simple Muslims there is no "moderate Islamist": the Islamists they know and are familiar with demand that their followers commit jihad against the Christian and the Jew as prescribed in their Koran. The "moderate Islamist" may be around to witness the demise of his political and religious rivals and reap the financial benefits of Western approval, but the real Islamist, not the moderate Islamist, is the Muslim who sacrificed his life and his family's future for that same victory. So long as the real Islamist continues killing and maiming his enemies, the "moderate Islamist" exists only in the minds of naive Western journalists. No matter how strongly Western journalists insist otherwise, politics will always be a bloodsport for the moderate Islamist.

Michael Devolin