What's in the name?

Submitted by Frankz (United Kingdom), Sep 13, 2014 at 18:24

This is an interesting clarification but both translations are clearly not correct if Islamic State intended "Greater Syria" to mean a region roughly comprising the Levant region then that is a better translation despite its "gentle and exotic connotations".

Islamic State clearly cares nothing for those and they're geographically irrelevant besides being lost on most people.

For Islamic State ISIS certainly meant whatever they intended it to mean.

However all this is irrelevant since they've changed their name to Islamic State which is what they are and what they should be called.

Iraq and Syria are two countries within which they currently control large areas and it seems clear to me ISIS was used to delineate their ambitions within those two states. There's no reason to deliberately read the Levant region specifically into the title since their ultimate ambitions obviously extended much further anyway.

The reason the administration's executive branch uses the term ISIL may not be common knowledge but Liz Peek gives quite a convincing reason as to a possible explanation.

Please, enough technical smudging in the interests of bi-partisan fastidiousness. Obama is quite fastidious enough about this already but whether he's fastidious about defeating Islamic State is a question that really shouldn't be polarized.

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