Barack Obama said in his speech last night that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is not Islamic nor a state. House Democrats, meanwhile, have also been wrestling with what to call the group. They have chosen to refer to them as ISIL, as the president does, but not entirely for reasons of semantics or translation. The Washington Post reports, “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. Isis Martinez, a woman in Miami, has been gathering signatures for a petition titled, ‘Thousands of Women are Named Isis, Please Petition the Media to Use the Accurate Acronym ISIL.’ She has 138 signatures.” So the Democrats are basing their foreign policy on their own “war on women” meme. More…