Holy Inappropriate

My sentiments exactly. From an e-mail sent to the editor of World Net Daily on June 5, 2004:

"Holy city of Najaf," "Holy city of Karbala," "Holy city of Kufa," "Holy city of ..." References like these show up thousands of times in a Google news search. But not a single reference to the "Holy city of Jerusalem."

Journalists mindlessly propagate the "Holy city of ..." references to Iraqi [and other Muslim] cities that seem more likely to be hotbeds of terrorism and homes of torture and depravity. By doing so, I suspect it creates an aura of spiritual respectability for these towns that is certainly not deserved. Perhaps we should buy the journalists each a dictionary, along with a handbook on objective writing.

I call on all journalists to reject repeating these self-serving descriptive titles. They don't refer to the pope as the "Holy Father of the Catholic church," nor do they even refer to the Bible as the Holy Bible. Why on earth do they repeat the error when terrorists call their cities "holy" or their cause "holy"?