re: #74 Charles

No, it is not. The word denier is a perfectly good English word that means someone who denies something. It is not reserved for use to describe Holocaust deniers.

Charles, denier may be a perfectly bland term with a clear meaning to most people of western culture, but it is a highly charged term in some other cultures.

Kufr - Entymology

The word kāfir is the active participle of the root K-F-R “to cover”. As a pre-Islamic term it described farmers burying seeds in the ground, covering them with soil while planting. Thus, the word kāfir implies the meaning “a person who hides or covers”. In Islamic parlance, a kāfir is a word used to describe a person who rejects Islamic faith, i.e. “hides or covers [viz., the truth]”.[2]

“kafara” ~ the root verb ~ means “he hid (something)” and “he covered (something)” or “He hid (something) by covering it up.” Both “hiding” and “covering up” are indelible significations of all of the words arising on the verbal root.

The Hebrew cognate word kofer also means “apostate”.