WorldNetDaily wants a reason President Obama uses ISIL instead of ISIS to refer to the Islamic State extremist group currently running roughshod in Iraq and Syria. But the truth is too boring, so it will promote the craziest theories instead.
An unbylined Sept. 11 WND article does just that, advancing unfounded speculation that Obama uses ISIL because he’s “tipping his hat” to the group (Fox News’ Harris Faulkner), because use of ISIL means Israel doesn’t exist (Allen West). There is no evidence that anyone at WND ever bothered to ask anyone who’s actually knowledgeable about the issue about Obama’s use of ISIL terminology.
WND could have checked with the Washington Post, however. Two days before WND’s article appeared, the Post reported:
Many politicians and media organizations that have chosen ISIL rather than ISIS have said they went with the former as a paean to grammar. When you translate the Arabic name for the group of insurgents (Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham) into English, many argue that using “the Levant” (a.k.a. ISIL) to describe the region is most accurate[.] […]
In the Capitol on Tuesday morning, House Democrats decided after a long debate that they too would call the extremist group ISIL — partly because ISIS was a name that first belonged to a goddess, and then to thousands of women who took said goddess’s name, before a terrorist group claimed it. As Max Fisher at Vox reported last week, many women named Isis have been aggravated by the acronym favored by most people discussing the Islamic State.
But actual reporting is too much for WND. It would rather engage is baseless, Obama-smearing speculation.