Free Republic

Is it ISIL, ISIS or Islamic State? Whatever you call the jihadist group known for killing dozens of people at a time, carrying out public executions, beheadings, crucifixions and other brutal acts, there is no denying they have captured the world's attention. On the eve of President Barack Obama's speech outlining Washington's strategy against the group, in which he will likely refer to it as ISIL, we ask: What's in a name?

It is time for the United States President to stop attacking American citizens and declare ISIS the real enemy! Since 2008, we have been told that President Obama is Christian. However, are these assertions true? Gallop polls since 2008 have shown that fewer and fewer Americans believe he is actually Christian. As a matter of fact, President Obama’s approval ratings are and have remained the highest among Muslims than any other group in the United States. The United States remains a predominantly Christian nation, with over half of our population identifying with a Protestant religion and a quarter with Catholicism....

President Barack Obama favorably quoted and praised on Wednesday in his speech before the United Nations a controversial Muslim cleric whose organization has reportedly endorsed the terror group Hamas and supported a fatwa condoning the murder of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Obama in his remarks offered praise to controversial cleric Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah and referred to him as a moderate Muslim leader who can help combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL or ISIS) radical ideology. However, Bin Bayyah himself has long been engulfed in controversy for many of his views, including the reported backing of...

<p>Military types say his big goal and his puny tools are a mismatch, which could mean he has been too clever by half. It’s likely he is ­underestimating the terrorists’ lust for blood and overestimating his ability to fool voters into thinking he is resolute.</p>

President Obama has refused to commit American soldiers to the fight against the brutal Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), saying “we don’t have a strategy” to defeat the terrorists. Network newscasts have praised the president’s statements against ISIL, labeling them “tough.” They also praised the expediency of his “fighting words.” Newsbusters reports: After President Obama admitted on Thursday that he had “no strategy” for dealing with the ISIS terrorist network, on Wednesday, the network morning shows rushed to portray the aimless commander-in-chief as a tough-talking leader ready to “destroy” the radical killers. At the top...

What do Syrian President Bashar Assad and the U.S. Congress have in common? President Obama is unlikely to ask either for a formal green light to expand the American air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from Iraq into Syria. White House aides underline that the debate remains academic for now because the president has yet to decide whether he will order strikes on the brutal Islamist movement’s strongholds in Syria. “We have not speculated about what sort of authority would be required from Congress if the president were to make a decision to authorize...

here has been little notice of the president’s insistent use of the acronym “ISIL” to describe the Sunni forces currently rampaging across Iraq, executing Iraqi military and creating a new massive refugee population in an already unstable area. With the exception of Reuters and now the Associated Press, most news organizations have not referred to ISIL until President Obama began using the term, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. But when Obama used the term 5 times on June13, and 16 times in his commencement speech at West Point on June 19th, he was using his...

To most Americans, Obama’s use of the term ISIL instead of ISIS is a bit curious. It is widely acknowledged that ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria while ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant. But is the difference in the acronyms harmless or do they represent a hidden and sinister message? Arguably America has two enemies today: one foreign and one domestic. The foreign enemy can easily be identified as ISIS while the domestic one is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Understanding your enemy is always a smart thing to do,...

ISIS or ISIL? There is a BIG difference! By Thomas Madison I posted this peculiarity last week. It has become increasingly conspicuous, annoying even, that while the rest of the world refers to the cockroaches beheading innocent people, including children, across Syria and Iraq, as ISIS, or IS, King Hussein, and the rest of his administration insist on referring to the lice-ridden scumbags as ISIL. “Tomaytoes/tomahtoes?” Hmmmmmm, I don’t think so. If you look closely at the literal, geographical difference between the two acronyms, it appears that there is much more to the story. ISIS is an acronym for the...

So Hussein (Obama) Decides to Call ISIS ISIL and the Media is Unquestioningly Complicit? Ainsley Earhardt: “They changed the name in the middle of all this to ISIL. They don’t have the right to do that. We’re going to continue to call them ISIS.” Harris Faulkner: “So our president is tipping his hat to them.” Earhardt: “They changed the name…” Faulkner: “So, it’s the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Levant is a bigger territory. That’s why they want to embrace that name and it includes many, many more countries than just Syria.” Jesse Watters: “And I think the...

This is really scary...unless you're a Muslim.This is worth taking a few minutes to understand. Decoding Obama’s speech reveals some startling revelations “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Genesis 12:3 In one press conference after another, when referring to the Muslim terror super-group ISIS, United States President Barack Obama will use the term ISIL instead of their former name ISIS or current name Islamic State. Have you ever wondered about that? We have. ISIL stands for the Islamic State of...

In one press conference after another, when referring to the Muslim terror super-group ISIS, United States President Barack Obama will use the term ISIL instead of their former name ISIS or current name Islamic State. Have you ever wondered about that? We have. ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Now, to us Westerners we don’t really make much of a distinction, do we? No, honestly from our perspective its all about the same. But how would a Muslim living in the Middle East view it? Just what is the Levant anyway? Let’s take a look. The...

There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have...

Some conservatives have tried to make something of the fact that President Barack Obama routinely refers to the organization that seized the Iraqi city of Mosul and declared a caliphate not as the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or ISIS, but as the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIL. In his televised address about the group on September 10, for example, he used the acronym ISIL twenty times. The ISIS vs. ISIL controversy first emerged, as far as I can tell, when FoxNews.com published “Obama’s Use of ISIL, not ISIS, Tells Another Story” on August 24,...

James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda. And the agenda was obvious from his Twitter feed.Any human life lost is tragic, but a moral individual would have much more empathy for the Syrian Christians who suffered at the hands of Foley’s favorite Jihadists than one of their pet propagandists. Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government.He cheered on the Sunni Muslim terrorists fighting to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Aleppo. In the conflict...

The president of the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, has called the actions of Islamic State militants "embarrassing" to the religion and urged Islamic leaders to unite in tackling extremism. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said the scale of the slaughter wrought by the extremists in overrunning large swathes of Iraq and Syria and the level of violence being used was appalling. "It is shocking. It is becoming out of control," he said in an interview with The Australian, a day after IS released a video showing a masked militant beheading US reporter James Foley, provoking worldwide revulsion. "We do not...

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the jihadist group which has seized territory in Iraq and Syria, on Sunday declared itself an Islamic "caliphate" and called on factions worldwide to pledge their allegiance, Reuters reported, citing a statement posted on Islamist websites and Twitter. According to the report, the group has shortened its name to "Islamic State" and proclaimed its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "Caliph" - the head of the state. "He is the imam and khalifah (Caliph) for the Muslims everywhere," the group's spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said in the statement, which was translated into...

A young Christian girl beheaded in Syria. The sign of extremism and fanatics, the long beards, is present in each and everyone of these subhuman Muslims who killed this small child, in their jihad to Allah – inspired by the Quran. This is Obama, Britain, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey funded and supported handiwork. Don’t put your support behind any of these people, whether for military action in Syria, asylum, immigration, another hate preaching mosque. This is what is moving into your town, your country, your society, your neighborhood: video... This video is written with false propaganda claiming...

The U.S-Russia plan to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons is drawing attention to Israel's own suspected chemical stockpile and could raise pressure on the Jewish state to come clean about its capabilities. Israel signed the landmark international treaty banning the production or use of chemical weapons two decades ago, but it is among a handful if nations that have never ratified the deal. ...

Half of Syrian rebels are hardline Islamists: British study AFP - Jihadists and members of hardline Islamist groups make up almost half of forces fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to extracts from a British defence study published in Monday's Daily Telegraph. The analysis by defence consultancy IHS Jane's, due to be published in full later this week, puts the number of rebel forces at around 100,000, the Telegraph reported. But these fighters have split into as many as 1,000 bands since violence flared two years ago, the study concluded. Of the rebel forces, IHS Jane's estimates that around...