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Same reason illegal aliens were called asylum seekers and immigrants - propaganda and politics.

It becomes easier to influence the public towards supporting something when you can reframe it as a moral problem. We saw this in the 1990s under Bush I when they did the whole "babies thrown out from incubators" lie that garnered support for the first Gulf war. We saw it again with the "tubes for WMDs" in the second Iraq war.

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You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.

There is an objective difference between the terms. By mislabelling something, it is an outright falsehood, just like the lies about the Iraq war.

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