"Purported" Killings, "So-Called" Islamic State

ISIS Video Purports to Show Execution of Christian Men in…

Why “purported” all over the place, in headlines, on the radio? Why is an element  of doubt introduced, as if it might be a hoax,something put up by those who want to make the Islamic State look bad?

And while we’re on the subject, why does NPR constantly refer to the “so-called Islamic State.” Why “so-called”? Is that in order to signal that those who call the “Islamic State” the “Islamic State” are clearly wrong, that this “Islamic State” which does not commit any atrocity without giving a full Qur’anic justification for it, or adduces support in the Hadith when it needs to, “has nothing to do with Islam”?

Why does NPR, if it is so interested in this word “so-called” not use it, not once, before other fixed tendentious phrases, far more doubtful.

For example, why not use the phrase “the so-called Palestinian people” so as to properly cast doubt on this recent (post-Six-Day-War) invention of a people out of the local Arabs, done solely to appeal to creduolous Westerners, who might forget that the phrase, the idea, was never heard or seen before the Arab defeat in the Six-Day-War, and was created, as Zuheir Mohsen famously noted in an interview with James Dorsey that appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, “solely for political reasons.”

Or why not put the “so-called” before the word “occupied” as in “the so-called occupied West Bank”? Why not show a little doubt, or more than a little, about the misapplication of the word “Occupied” to territory to which, according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine (not to be tampered with by the U.N. — see Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and the World Court’s interpretation of its significance) Israel has a superior legal title. And that legal title comes out of  the recognition, by such statesmen and Clemenceau and Jan Christian Smuts and others who tried to deal fairly with the diffferent peoples, not only Muslim Arabs, who lived in the lands that hd been held for half-a-millennium by the Ottomans, of a long record of history, and a moral claim. too, to that tiny sliver on the dusty edge of Asia. This is not a “so-called” legal, historic, and moral claim. It’s the  real thing. Not so-called. Deeply called-for.