It would be hard to imagine two more opposite groups.  The International Society for Individual Liberty, or ISIL, has been around much longer than the recent terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  However, recently, the name has been causing quite a lot of confusion.

The top comment from our blog articles from the past few months has been, “What an unfortunate domain name.”

This brings us to the question, should we change our name?

After all, in the past few months, many groups with similar names have decided to bite the bullet and drop their name.  The FX show Archer is dropping the name of it’s “International Secret Intelligence Service”, or ISIS.

A mobile wallet system is also changing it’s name from ISIS to Softcard, to avoid confusion.

Meanwhile, American President Barack Obama is trying to do some name changing of his own, preferring to use the term ISIL, instead of ISIS, for political reasons.

However, there is no indication that we, the Individual Society for Individual Liberty are going to change our name, just because a terrorist group decided to jump into the political limelight.

First of all, the terrorist group is not so powerful that the entire world has to go around changing their names to make room.  Are we really that terrified that we have to live our lives around their marketing decisions?

Secondly, just wait a few months, and the name will likely change.  Already it’s migrated from ISIL, to ISIS, to just IS.  Who knows what they’ll call themselves next?

Third, it’s kind of nice to know that balancing out the world’s most feared terrorist group, is the world’s most peaceful libertarian group.  We are, after all, complete opposites, and that’s just kind of neat.

But finally — we simply don’t want to.  We at the International Society for Individual Liberty are too independent minded — too libertarian — to go around changing our name to satisfy some terroristic whim which will come and go.  And when the terrorist group is finally out of the public eye, we’ll still be here, just like we have been since 1969, working for a world with more liberty, peace, and less government across the board.
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Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Agyemang Richard says:

    Thank you for the bold decission taken to keep ISIL. Obama is trying to draw ISIL in terrorist fray by refusing to call them ISIS. There are two forces coming down on him, though from opposite direction and with different motivation. We, at ISIL, are motivated by te love for peace, accountability, transparency, limited spending by goverments, love for the poor and the zeal to inform to exert positive pressure on him and his likes to change. We will therefore not succumb to his antics by refering to ISIS as ISIL to change our name. It will take years to build reputation around any name if we should go for one. And that may provide him and his likes the room to widening to their tentacles. No way!

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