Via WaPo:
On Wednesday, John Kerry was speaking at NATO headquarters in Belgium during a meeting of the United States-led coalition against the Islamic State extremist group. During his remark, the secretary of state made a subtle, yet noteworthy, change to the language he was using: He began referring to the Islamic State by a name they hate.
After Kerry’s first reference to the group in the speech, Kerry stopped referring to the group as ISIL (short for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and instead began referring to them as Daesh, an acronym for the group based on the Arabic original.
Kerry has rarely used the term Daesh to refer to the Islamic State. In October, he sporadically used the phrase while talking with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in Cairo, though he still used ISIL in most references. On Wednesday, however, Kerry referred to the group as Daesh almost exclusively – he used the term 16 times and only used ISIL twice.
WaPo interprets that as John Kerry calling them that because ISIS hates being called that. But that was a name they always called themselves since their beginning, so why is he only starting to use it now? Let me suggest another reason, more in keeping with other statements that Kerry has made. He is fond of saying that ISIS is not Islamic. But calling it ISIL, ISIS or IS all have “Islamic” inherent in the name. With Daesh, “Islamic” is not necessarily screaming in the name for most Americans. France has done the same thing, basically admitting they are also going to use “Daesh” so as not to be ‘offensive’.