One of my favorite pages in Time Magazine is the “Verbatim” page, where some of the week’s most outrageous quotes are featured. In the Jan. 18 issue, Ramy Zamzam is quoted as saying, “We are not terrorists. We are jihadists and jihad is not terrorism.”

Right, and I’m the Pope. C’mon, enough with the semantics. You try to kill people because you think the world is attacking Islam, because you want to spread Muslim territories (although not necessarily Islamic faith), because you’ve misunderstood (or, some argue, understood all too well and thus taken ancient texts too literally) the Qu’ran’s call for jihad. But that killing of folks for being different, that qualifies as terrorism, buddy, no matter what you want to call it.

While the French often make me crazy, the fact that they keep their language so tight, allowing few, if any, synonyms for words, assures that people are precise in their use of words. It’s hard to misunderstand them because when they say cup, they mean cup. With Zamzam and his allies, we’ve got a problem of definition. Afterall, there are definitions of jihad here, here and here, and not all of them agree as to how this “holy war” should be carried out, if at all. But the fact remains that when it is carried out, it is an offensive (as opposed to defensive) act and it shoots to kill anyone who disagrees with it.

Likewise the word “terrorism,” defined here, here and here. You’ll notice the commonality in the definitions is the “use of terror” (fear) to control large swaths of folks. With that definition, one could argue that the U.S. acts like a terrorist when it foments fear among the general public to get us to give up some of our liberties, but I think most would agree that that kind of fear-making is not on the same level as a bomb-strapped crazyman (or woman) walking into a cafe and pressing a switch to blow up everyone within 25 feet.

So, Mr. Zamzam, say what you will, but you are a terrorist. It may make you feel better calling yourself a jihadist, but the end result is the same: You are a cold-blooded (wannabe) murderer. You can coat it in semantics, fiddling with the definitions for your acts, justifying your murderous plans by saying Allah requires it of you (doubtful), that only your one type of Muslim is truly Muslim and thus protected from attack (ridiculous) and/or that jihad isn’t terror because you’re just trying to protect Islam from attack by McDonald’s and P. Diddy (nothing more threatening than a BigMac and a rapper with questionable grammar).

But, really, don’t you think you could sleep better at night if you’d at least get a grip and accept that your form of jihad is terrorism? Go for it; be a man. Oh, I forgot, you can’t be a man – you’re a jihadist.

**** And from the other side of the news magazine aisle, and courtesy of a Face Book post from a former Tucson Citizen employee, comes this Newsweek essay by lawyer Ted Olson (who defines himself as “a politically active, lifelong Republican, a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations…”) in support of gay marriage. He has decided to help in the legal fight to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which overturned California’s constitutional right ot gay marriage. A snip from the essay:

Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one’s own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society.

I’ve often argued that the reason we should accept gay marriage is because it would normalize what is already happening and encourage stability in gay relationships. I keep thinking of how I would feel if one of my children were gay. I would want him/her to settle down, just like I want my straight kids to. I want them to find that one person with whom to share life and get on with the lawn-mowing and taking out the trash and paying taxes and just, overall, move out of the college mind set of anyone, anytime, anywhere. So, congrats to a die hard conservative like Olson for sticking his neck out with this essay.

National Public Radio this morning had a report that included interviews with doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s Fort Hood massacre. That report came before employees at WR were put on lock down as far as talking to anyone, including the press, and, according to NPR, the FBI.

I can’t find the report on their Web site, although this story mentions briefly how Hasan was reprimanded for proselytizing about Islam when he was in training at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Even though I’m lacking evidence that what I heard in the car this morning wasn’t a product of my imagination, I’m sticking my neck out with a big question: Why didn’t the folks at Walter Reed report this guy as crazy if what they recall happening indeed did happen?

I think it is because there is a fine line between racial/ethnic/religious profiling and pointing out the obvious and people are really afraid of crossing over to the wrong side. Since 9/11 people have been afraid of appearing racist where Muslims are concerned. There’s good reason for that, such as the case of the flying imams.

So, instead of appearing intolerant, people stay quiet, even – sometimes especially – other Muslims. They don’t want to be judged by their religion so they are reluctant to judge others by that rubric, even when they know that the person they are dealing with is dangerous.

A few months after 9/11, I was working on an analysis piece for the Texas Catholic, and I interviewed a Dallas imam about this very thing. I asked him why imams would keep quiet if they knew someone nefarious was in their congregations. He said that if a dangerous Muslim was at a mosque, the best thing was to hope that he – in hearing the moderate, educated teaching preached at the majority of American mosques – would either change his stripes or, “in most cases, we just hope he leaves.” The community wants the crazy guy out of their religious space because, the imam said, lunatics are just as likely to kill other Muslims as anyone else.

In other words, moderate Muslims are trying to protect themselves as much as the rest of us, but in so doing – in not directly going after the crazies among them – they are putting others at risk. Ditto for your average citizen, or the doctors who knew Hasan. Who wants to be called intolerant or a racist? According to the NPR story, Hasan was cold, horrible with patients and fanatical about his religion. Doctors would talk about him in the hallway, the report said, asking themselves if he could be a terrorist or if he was just a really bad doctor.

Who knows if that is what drew him to kill people at Fort Hood? We won’t know until the investigation is complete, or until he talks. (And once he gets a lawyer, fat chance of him talking). But what we do know is that he was not a very warm, caring doctor – even by military standards – and people noticed that early on. They noticed that he seemed more concerned with his religion than his schooling and treatment of soldiers. They noticed that he used  medical lecture slot to preach the Quran. And yet he continued at the medical school, worked at the hospital, moved on like low-achieving students who are socially promoted because the grade they are leaving just wants them out of their hair.

What happened at Fort Hood shows that common sense really needs a shot in the arm. We don’t necessarily have to go all Hannity on folks, but we need to stop being so afraid of speaking up when craziness is staring us in the face.