Letter writer Susan Petrarca raises an excellent point when she asserts that criminals such as those who attacked the Russian school should rightly be called “terrorists,” not “militants,” “insurgents” or “rebels” (Voice of the people, Sept. 8).
Almost as erroneous as not calling those people by their right name is the dubbing of their captives as “hostages.”
“Hostages,” in the original meaning of the term, since dulled by decades of misuse, were exchanged by the parties to an agreement to give each side a personal stake in the carrying out of the terms of the agreement.
Captives such as those in the Russian school are not “hostages”; they are “kidnapping victims.” Kidnapping is done in order to extort a result that is not agreed to beforehand and would not otherwise occur absent the kidnapping. To call the captives of terrorists “hostages” lends the terrorists and their actions a dignity that they do not deserve. Call them “kidnapping victims” and it becomes clear, to borrow Petrarca’s phrase, that there is not the slightest shred of justification for them to be put in that position.
