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Firefighters stood in the street and watched people choose the air over the fire. 9/11 was a planned massacre carried out by jihadists who said exactly what they were doing. Softening the noun does not spare the dead. It only trains the next audience to treat mass murder as a vocabulary dispute.Canada’s discomfort with the word ter*orism is a diplomatic flinch. Allies who cannot say what happened on a clear Tuesday morning are not clarifying history. They are managing feelings. Three thousand people were murdered in the name of a political religion that still recruits. Calling it by its name is the minimum a serious country owes the crews who ran toward the towers and the families who never got a body back.Remembering is not collective punishment of every Muslim on earth. It is a refusal to launder the operation into “violence” with no subject. Keep the date, keep the footage, and keep the charge. Terrorism is the accurate term. Anyone who wants it retired should explain that to the men in the helmets who had nothing left to throw but a glance upward.