The New York Times was a lot less shy about referring to the Irgun as a terrorist organization back in 1947:
A bomb thrown by the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi from a speeding taxi today killed eleven Arabs and two British policemen and wounded at least thirty-two Arabs by the Jerusalem Damascus Gate, the same place where a similar bombing took place sixteen days ago.
Just so we're clear: Irgun in 1947 = terrorists. Irgun in 2010 = paramilitaries.
This may seem like not a big deal, but the reason it bothers me is that there's been a really narrow conflation of "terrorism" and "Islam" in American culture, to the point where I think some media organizations actually feel like it's necessary to use euphemisms to refer to groups that employ violence as a political tool against civilians because the use of the word "terrorism" is reserved for when Muslims kill people.
One final point -- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was a leader of the Irgun, and he's far from the only member of the Israeli political establishment to have ties to the group. Yet he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize along with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after their 1979 peace agreement. So when Rep. Peter King said that "you couldn't have peace" between Ireland and Britain without talking to the IRA, he actually does have a point about the practical limits of trying to purge people with ties to extremists entirely from peace negotiations and political processes.
