World Net Daily wrong again

This has been bothering me for a couple of days: On October 29, WND reported that Al-Jazeera had taken to calling suicide operations "paradise operations."

In a story about the Russian foreign minister criticizing the Palestinian Authority for failing to combat terrorist movements, a paragraph reads: "Ariel Sharon ordered the defense minister Shaul Mofaz previously to undertake wide attacks on the movement of the Islamic Jihad, whose military wing yesterday undertook (||am-ma-li-a al cha-deer-ra) operations of paradise, which killed five Israelis and injured tens of Israelis – or whoever was standing around."

Previously suicide bombings have been called "ammaliat in-ta-har-i-a" – suicide operations.

Arabic is a very flowery language, and Arabs like to use different terms for the same concept to spice things up a bit, but, contrary to wingnut opinion, Al-Jazeera is not a terrorist channel. They are no worse than Faux News in terms of objectivity.

There is no word "ja-deer-ra" in Arabic that means paradise. (Iraqis and some other Arabs pronounce the j as "ch," but there is no letter "ch" in the Arabic language.) There is a word "jidri" (جذري) which means "radical" as in extremist, but it is not in widespread usage. Since "operations" is plural, the word would take on a feminine ending and would be "jidria," which is quite similar to "jadeera," isn't it? It is possible that this or some mutation of the word was used, but the word does NOT mean "paradise."

It is interesting to note that the English word "paradise" comes from the Persian word "pairi daeza", meaning a walled garden.

(If you wingnuts want to badmouth my credentials to talk about this, take a look at my resume and then shut up.)