How important is a name?

Many Muslims outside of the Middle East are up in arms about the use of the word 'state' when referring to ISIS. Some are so upset that they have formed a Twitter hashtag #NotInMyName. 

While most of the protest seems to be about words, in France it's a different story. There, a Muslim leader called for a protest meeting relative to the beheading of a French mountaineering guide last month. And hundreds of Muslims listened to him and gathered outside the Great Mosque of Paris to express their revulsion over the brutality of a group whose name and ideology, they said, was an insult to Muslims everywhere.

The leader, Ahmet Ogras, vice president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, went further, “This is not a state; this is a terrorist organization. I call them terrorists because that’s what they are. One has to call a dog a dog." Ogras is worried that the now-common use of the name Islamic State threatened to stigmatize France’s Muslims, Europe’s largest Muslim community. He also said that the name conferred unwarranted legitimacy on a group carrying out killings in the name of Islam.