Sunday, 5 October 2014
Middle East - What's in a name?
Well, I don't know about you but I'd be a lot more confident of the Western world being able to help out in the Middle East if the various governments, politicians etc. could manage to agree who they are taking action against. No - not physically who they want to take action against - I think they may have managed to decide on that, but what they are calling them.... When they first started being talked about on the news they were 'IS, formally known as <something or other that I don't even remember>'. That was obviously too much of a mouthful so had been shortened to IS by a lot of the media. However, apparently IS should not be used because they are considered to be neither Islamist or a State (although I'm not sure who made the unilateral decision to stop using the term - it obviously must have taken up hours of debating time by some unheard-of and unelected body of people!). Anyway, now we have politicians and the media calling them either IS, ISIS or ISIL. And the French have decided to call them Daesh because that is what the Arabic speaking media use. You can witness interviews on the TV where one person is using one acronym and the other is using a different acronym - oh and it has happened in exchanges in the House of Commons too. It would be nice if everyone could just pick one of the names and stick to it!
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