IS IT accurate and/or expedient to use the word “genocide” to describe the persecution of religious minorities by the terrorist group known as Islamic State, Daesh or a variant of that name? Hypothetical as it might seem, that question is a real dilemma for people in high places in western Europe and America. On January 20th, Federica Mogherini, the foreign-policy chief of the European Union, gave a speech to the European Parliament in which she deplored the suffering of Christians and other minority faiths in the Middle East but carefully stopped short of using the word genocide, to the great disappointment of many MEPs and religious-freedom campaigners.

Those campaigners took heart when another Strasbourg-based body of legislators, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), took a much firmer position. PACE is an arm of the 47-nation Council of Europe. The European Parliament, an organ of the 28-nation European Union and rather more important, will also vote on the IS-and-genocide question in a few days' time. The PACE resolution, passed on January 27th, denounced the wave of terror attacks on civilians in Europe and the Middle East and added:

…Many of these recent terrorist attacks are claimed by, and may be attributed to, individuals who act in the name of the terrorist entity which calls itself Da’ish and who have perpetrated acts of genocide and other serious crimes punishable under international law. States should act on the presumption that Da’ish commits genocide and should be aware that this entails action under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In America, too, there is top-level hand-wringing about the question of whether or not to accuse IS of the ultimate crime. It was reported late last year that the Obama administration might soon designate as genocide the persecution of the Yazidis, a religious minority in Iraq whom IS call devil-worshippers. This followed a study by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, arguing that IS’s treatment of the Yazidis amounted to an attempted extermination.

That prompted a group of 30 bishops and scholars, representing an impressively broad span of American Christianity, to write to the administration, insisting that the word applied as much to atrocities against their co-religionists in the Middle East as it did to those against the Yazidis.

Why does anyone suggest a distinction between the fates of the Christians and the Yazidis? One of the arguments being used, it seems, is that IS has openly declared its intention to kill male Yazidis and enslave female ones, whereas Christians in the terrorists' grip have reportedly been given a choice of converting to Islam, fleeing or paying a punitive tax, in other words outcomes short of death. But the 30 signatories pointed out that there was plenty of evidence of Christians, too, being killed by the terror group as part of a “genocidal campaign” which including “summary executions, including by beheadings and crucifixions, occurring as recently as only a few months ago.”

Hillary Clinton seems to have been persuaded by these arguments, as have most of her Republican opponents. Answering a voter’s question, she said she had been reluctant to use the term genocide, because of its broad implications; but the latest evidence made it clear to her that IS’s actions were “deliberately aimed at destroying not only the lives, but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East…”

Why so much coyness, you might ask, over the use of a word? However you characterise IS, nobody doubts that across the Middle East and beyond, it has perpetrated some egregiously ghastly acts of persecution: not just against Christians and Yazidis but against lesser-known religious groups like the Shabaks and the Mandaeans, as well as Muslims it doesn’t like. In Yemen (pictured), most civilian victims of an IS offshoot have been Shia Muslims.

The reason for the coyness lies precisely in the “broad implications” mentioned by Mrs Clinton. As was disclosed by Samantha Power, a scholar of genocide who later became the Obama administration’s envoy to the United Nations, the word was carefully avoided by the State Department in 1994, even as the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda was unfolding, “for fear of being obliged to act.” The same fear is clearly being felt now.

Even if that fear were miraculously dispelled, and the word boldly employed to describe the actions of IS, the question of how to act would not be a simple one. By no means all Middle Eastern Christians are convinced that a storming intervention by Western powers is the right thing to save their communities. But it's a shame when words are avoided not because they are inaccurate, but because they may have awkward consequences.