Terrorist can be a loaded word in a political context. We have terms like "freedom fighter", " revolutionary", and "rebel", but these don't quite have neural connotations either.
"Insurgent" is used by the media quite frequently, but pundits have twisted this word into little more than an alias for "terrorist". My brain subconsciously makes this mapping despite my knowledge of a contrary meaning; I think maybe language is too pliable in politics.
Maybe we need yet new language to escape the difficulty of communicating without biases inherent in the vocabulary (our minds already do enough to short-circuit logic already without the English language making the matter worse). "Terrorism" and "unrest" are at such a forefront in the global consciousness that the whole subject is deserving of the few extra mental bytes that would be needed to disambiguate the mess.
If I were in charge of such a task, I would try to borrow words associated with certain well-known historical anecdotes in a hope that the pundits wouldn't simply redefine the words from under us. Hopefully such vocabulary would have enough of a semantic anchor in our generation to dispel such attempts, conscious or not.
To press on the issue further, it seems like it would be wise to engineer our language in a way that leads to better thinking. I suppose that would be too artificial to ever be accepted though.