Somewhere along the way, the world got comfortable saying the names of terrorists as though they were elected officials. Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis. Names that should send chills down your spine are now tossed around in policy briefings, press releases, and UN debates like they’re just part of the geopolitical furniture.
We hear analysts talk about their “interests.” Journalists speculate about their “next move.” Diplomats urge “dialogue.” As if these are rational actors seeking a better future — not terrorist death cults whose founding charters call for the annihilation of Israel and the extermination of Jews.
Let’s not pretend we don’t know who we’re dealing with.
Hamas’s founding charter doesn’t dance around it:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” (Hamas Charter, 1988) Never retracted.
The Houthis don’t bother with diplomacy either. Their slogan — repeated like liturgy — is:
“God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
And Hezbollah’s former leader, the now-eliminated Hassan Nasrallah, put it even more bluntly:
“If the Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” (The Daily Star, 2002)
These aren’t slips of the tongue. These are mission statements — publicly declared, proudly upheld, and violently pursued.
But here’s the deeper tragedy: it’s not just the world that’s normalized them. We have, too. We’ve started to speak their names without flinching. Without rage. We sit at negotiating tables with people who have no intention of peace — just the patience to delay their next attack. We talk about Hamas as if it’s a government. About Hezbollah as if it’s a militia. About the Houthis as if they’re a resistance movement.
But they are none of those things.
You don’t make deals with groups whose entire identity is built on your destruction. You don’t “find common ground” with people who chant for your death. You defeat them — or they destroy you. It really is that simple.
I don’t live in a think tank. I live in a country where my kids know what a Red Alert siren means before they know how to spell their own names. So no — I’m not interested in Western lectures about “proportionality.” I’m interested in survival.
Just a few days ago, the Houthis fired a ballistic missile at Ben Gurion Airport. It landed dangerously close. A few hundred meters off, and we’d be counting body bags. Flights were grounded. Civilians were wounded. Chaos nearly erupted at our most vital piece of infrastructure.
Now picture that same attack outside JFK. Or Heathrow. Or Charles de Gaulle. Would the world still be urging “restraint”? Or would the launch site be a smoking hole in the ground?
This is what happens when terror becomes background noise. When the world shrugs — and worse, when we shrug with it.
And it’s not just foreign governments and NGOs fueling this madness. It’s the media too. They don’t just report — they rewrite. They frame every Israeli airstrike as aggression, while burying the fact that the terrorists fired from a kindergarten. They parrot casualty numbers handed to them by Hamas like it’s gospel.
They don’t just shape opinion — they sanitize evil.
We’ve allowed genocidal monsters to rebrand. To launder their ideology through language. And every time we say their names without the weight they deserve, we give them a little more ground — morally, strategically, existentially.
So no, I won’t call Hamas “militants.”
I won’t call the Houthis “rebels.”
And I sure as hell won’t call Hezbollah “resistance.”
They are terrorists. They are monsters. And they are the armed wings of an ideology that doesn’t want land, or peace, or dignity — it wants obliteration.
If you still speak about them as if they’re legitimate actors, you’re either blind, brainwashed, or bought.
Because if someone launched a missile at your airport — you wouldn’t be talking about context.
You’d be demanding justice. You’d be demanding vengeance. You’d be demanding war.
So say their names if you must. But don’t say them as if they’re normal.
Say them like they’re what they are.
Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis.
Not factions.
Not fighters.
Terrorists.
And if we can’t even say that out loud — we’ve already lost the war of language. And we all know what comes next.