Always semantics

Is it me, or does "extremists" connote an unpleasant version of religious mania, while "militant" connotes an upstanding fighter? I hate the AP:

Thousands of Israeli police mobilized at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site Sunday but confronted only a handful of Jewish extremists intent on scuttling a Gaza pullout by tying up security forces. In Gaza, militants fired dozens of mortar shells after Israeli forces killed three teenagers.

I also note that this opening inflammatory paragraph leaves out the fact that there is much debate as to what the teenagers were doing in the line of fire, with the always reliable Palestinian witnesses claiming a harmless game of soccer, while the charmless (I'm sorry, it's true) Israeli military claiming that they were suspected smugglers, that they charged across a field, and that they ignored all calls to halt. For all the military's lack of PR charm, I'm inclined to believe them. I won't even go into the rest of the AP article, leaving it to people more adept with words and more knowledgeable than I to Fisk it properly.