Euphemisms

On the way home this evening, I heard a little bit about the 'radical cleric' al-Sadr. I got to thinking about how often you hear that phrase. So I did a Google on it, and an alternative;

Search 1:
Results 1 - 100 of about 16,000 for "moderate cleric". (0.28 seconds)

Search 2:
Results 1 - 100 of about 343,000 for "radical cleric". (0.24 seconds)

Fewer, and they took longer to find. Hmm..... Knowing very little about how searches work, I'll draw the simplest conclusion, which is that 'moderate cleric' doesn't appear nearly as often as 'radical cleric'. You might almost think that perhaps 'cleric' ought to imply 'radical', with those results.

I believe that most Muslims are decent people -- not great, not terrible, trying with varying degrees of effort and success to keep with the tenets of their faith. This must be pretty wretched for them.. It means that most people's image -- yes, including mine -- of Muslim clerics is wild-eyed murderous fanatics. I know its not true; I know its not fair. But I hear it so often, its hard to remember that in the global scheme of things, they are the minority. It's just that they're the armed and dangerous minority. The ones who want to kill me, and everyone like me. And they command bands of armed fanatics who are willing to subsume their own intelligence for the murderous will of their masters. Who are willing to die for it.

Scary.
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Update: This is an interesting CNN article. It contains this phrase, which grabbed me:

"The war in Iraq, in particular, has such a negative effect on the way Americans perceive Islam," she said. "The chaos there has led many Americans to have this association between Islam and violence."

Oh, yeah.