This article is beside the point. Does he really think scholarship has anything to do with the fact that the administration decided not to use the same term as the rest of the country? As if they just so happen to have the only experts who settled on the “ISIL” translation.
What is this “there’s no difference” b.s.? There’s not much difference between a democracy and a republic, since republics most often are representative democracies and hardly any democracy is purely majoritarian. Nevertheless, people hardly ever refer to our system of government as a republic, and either have a motive in pushing the word “democracy” or are the unconscious creatures of those who do. Likewise, some people throw a fit when our system isn’t referred to as a “republic,” even though they believe in nearly all the tenets of democracy.
Point is, words are weapons in the struggle for power, and they mean as much as they make people feel in day to day political squabbling as what’s written in dictionaries. It’s all well to float above politics and tell us what words mean, but aside from the fact that Pipes is an ideological hack who’s long sold his soul to the day to day, what people really want to know is why Obama uses an acronym different from the rest of the country, not the etymology of “Levant.”
Point is, words are weapons in the struggle for power...
Excellent summation.
With a straight face, Pipes ascribes an arcane and benign rationale to this administration's choice of the term ISIL--this same administration that struck the terms Islamic terror and Jihad from the lexicon, that called the Fort Hood terror attack (performed in the name of Allah)"workplace violence". And this same adminsistration that told us, just the other night, that no matter how you slice it, there's no Islam in the Islamic State of Whatever.