"Terrorista-barista, there's an annoying raisin in my scone again..."

 

The annoying raisin to which I refer is the dysphemism "radical", inserted so often in sentences alluding to the problem of Islam -- as in "radical Islam"; as though Islam straight no chaser, ordinary, mainstream Islam, isn't already a horrible, dangerous, anti-liberal ideology enshrining, motivating and calling for monstrous human rights violations.  (And, unfortunately, "radical" isn't the only dysphemism in this regard.)

For today's annoying raisin, we revisit our old friend Eric Metaxas, in his interview with Robert Spencer:

Eric Metaxas: [growing up as a Greek] I was taught to hate and fear "the Turks" -- not the Muslims, but the Turks because of what they had done to our people,,, I heard many horrible stories growing up. It's kind of like the Jews hearing stories about what the Nazis did: these are true stories. It doesn't mean that you have to be ethnocentric or that you have to hate a whole group of people -- because as a Christian, I don't believe we're supposed to do that -- but we are called to be "wise as serpents"; we are called to understand things. And so, because I was Greek I was sort of taught to hate "the Turks" and you realize wait a minute, it's not the Turks, it's the people who did this, and the people who did this to our Greek Orthodox forbears, they weren't "Turks" -- they were radical Muslims who happened at the time to be Turkish; but it wasn't their ethnicity as Turks, it was their religion as radical Muslims."

Robert Spencer: Yes, that's quite right, Eric, and it's very important.

Waiting for Spencer to correct Eric's dysphemism "radical"... no such luck. Later, Metaxas raises that metonymic phenomenon of the historical habit of calling them "Turks" instead of referring to the more pertinent aspect, their Islam -- and notice now that he's not directly referring to the problem of their Islam, he evidently feels no need to add that annoying raisin:

Eric Metaxas: ...part of the reason of this confusion with "Turks" and Muslims is because in history, a lot of times Muslims were just called "the Turk" or "Turks" -- there was this very confusing thing, and so when I grew up, the Greeks always talked about, "for 400 years, we were under the Ottoman Empire" and "the Turks, and the Turks, and the Turks" -- and what they really mean, of course, are the Muslims; they don't mean "the Turks", they mean the Muslims. "The Turk" was a term, often, for "Muslim".