I’m really getting sick and tired of my fellow rightists, FReepers included, harping on Obama abbreviating the State Department’s favored Englishing of an Arabic name, rather than the one the MSM favors, and acting as if it has some dark significance.
As I have posted before:
This is actually an example of the stopped clock phenomenon: Obama is right to call the group ISIL, though ISIS, when what the letters stand for is correctly understood is also correct. The people who are wrong are those who assert that the second S stands for Syria.
The group’s Arabic name before it proclaimed the restoration of the Caliphate was Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, which Englishes The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (abbreviating to ISIL) — al-Sham being the Arabic word for the Levant. If one wants to be exotic, one Englishes it as The Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (abbreviating to ISIS), and if one wants to be deceptive and hide the group’s ambition to minimize the threat, one pretends the second S stands for Syria, which is what the MSM has been doing, while State and Obama, but translating the last word to English before abbreviating are getting it right.
Alternatively, could favor the Arabic abbreviation that renders in Roman characters as DAISH, over both ISIL and ISIS. (Note the sh, rather than an s, there being an Arabic character for sh which is the first letter of Sham, while the Arabic character for s is not.)
I just call it the revived Caliphate.