![]() “I don't know what that means, but, believe me, the President does… What that means is: They have designs that go from Iran through Egypt. We are Iraq, Syria, and Levant,’” Glenn said of the terror group. “They changed their name because they started saying, ‘We are bigger than this. Obama has come under fire for underestimating the threat of this “jayvee team” wreaking havoc across the Middle East and threatening the western way of life, and yet he continuously refers to them as ISIL. It makes a big difference because of this: ISIL includes Levant, which includes the area we like to call Israel.” “The slightest thing from the president reverberates… We have been joking ISIS, ISIL, what's the difference. ![]() “So the president has the most powerful microphone on the planet,” Glenn said. And then, if you’re using “Levant,” you might as well as abbreviate it logically-so, ISIL. Sham is also a contemporary nickname for Damascus, the Syrian capital but modern-day Syria is called suriya.Īt Quartz we’ve chosen to render sham as “Levant” over “Syria,” on the grounds that while scholars of Middle Eastern history might recognize “Syria” to have a broader meaning, most of our readers will take it to mean modern-day Syria, i.e., suriya, not sham. It is used, in the phrase bilad al sham, to refer variously to: the contemporary Levant, a somewhat amorphous region sometimes understood to include Iraq, and sometimes not to the historical region called al sham in classical Arabic but known to the ancient Greeks and other civilizations as “Syria” or a variant thereof, which is roughly contiguous with the Levant and to a Syrian nationalist dream of a “Greater Syria,” a region of similar extent that includes Iraq. The last word, sham, is the problematic one. The group’s name in Arabic is al dawla al islamiyye f’il iraq w’al sham. “ encompasses parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and a place called Israel.” “Interesting fact about the Levant,” Stu responded. “Stu, what's the difference between ISIS and ISIL?” The President is making a big deal out of this is ISIL, right? The Administration wants to call it ISIL,” Glenn said on radio this morning. The differentiation between the word ‘Syria’ and the word ‘Levant’ is actually quite significant, however, given the usage of the term by President Obama and his administration. ISIL is the acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which seems remarkably similar to ISIS. IS simply stands for the Islamic State, while ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. You have probably heard each one of those acronyms at least once over the last several months as the media and politicians attempt to determine the best way to refer to the terror group that declared a caliphate spanning Syria and Iraq.
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