If you want to call them something they don't want to be called that's fine, but you're not being neutral.
Calling this group daesh challenges everything about them, their legitimacy, their aspirations, and their leadership. That it has deeper meaning in Arabic is icing on the cake as far as crafting an insult goes.
Do we really think name-calling is the way to stop them? It's juvenile.
However, if you appear biased, then people are more likely to question the validity of what you are saying itself.
Flippantly dismissing the Islamic State as an illogical death cult that just wants to rape and torture ignores their true aspirations and the legitimacy they draw from Islamic scripture.[1] To fight an ideology, you have to make an effort to understand it.
[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
> Why would you want to be neutral toward a group
1. If you say, "ISIS", everyone knows what you're talking about. Not so for "Daesh."
2. Anyone can read "ISIS" and know how to pronounce it. How does one pronounce "Daesh"? Is it daysh? Dash? Dah-esh? I don't know.
3. We'll still need to know and use the old names. There are thousands of historical news articles using the terms ISIS, ISIL, IS, The Islamic State, etc. Googling for them is already hard enough. It reminds me of xkcd's Standards (http://xkcd.com/927/).
4. "Daesh" autocorrects to other things on iOS, Android, and Windows 10. It was very annoying to write this comment, as I was constantly un-correcting "dash".
The author makes some good points, but I think they're outweighed by the disadvantages I mentioned. Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag. We now have yet another name for ISIS.
Edit: I just thought of another one. If "Daesh" takes off, people may think those who use "ISIS" or "The Islamic State" are sympathetic toward the group. I'm certain I'll slip up in conversation and have to dig myself out of a hole.
The name sounds trivial, but I don't think it's a stretch to believe that if this name actually became widespread, it could have a significant (if small) impact on "Daesh's" recruitment, which would seem to be worth the annoyance.
Also, autocorrect usually leaves all-caps acronyms unmolested.
Islamic State in Iraq & Al-sham
That one, to me, was even MORE ridiculous than ISIL which was stupid to begin with. Who the fuck calls anything "The Levant" anymore, Jesus Christ himself? What century is this?
This is where you start to understand 2 things.
1. There are people trying to erase Syria and invalidate
the concept of Syria's statehood, and erode the public
perception of national borders as they exist, so that
amidst the propaganda campaign, we forget about
the inconvenient countries that get in the way of
campaigns for regional repartitioning along sectarian
boundaries.
2. There are political motives to avoid using "ISIS"
because it "sounds cooler" like a cartoon super
villain, and seems to "send the wrong message" to
viewers.
That's the subliminal message I'm noticing within all the spin doctoring.
Language does matter and the words used to describe people who fight and die violently matters a lot.
Based on this comment, what do you want us to learn/know/understand or do?
If you're familiar with American politics, consider the left's phrase "pro-choice" vs the right's depiction of the same position as "pro-abortion". They both know they're describing the same thing, and both are attempting to win the battle of hearts and minds.
What ISIS Really Wants http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Hollywood likes black and white narratives, things like Nazis vs the rest of the world. The mass media, pundits, and politicians follow this path. Much of what has occurred has been heavily politicized and yet both Republican and Democrats completely inoculate each other to the bad decision making because it is so damning to not just the Bush administration but the Obama administration as well. Even today I find very few people who understand the conflicts between the Sunni and Shia. The mental model of what is going on in most American's heads is kind of like a Donald Duck cartoon during World War II.
There may now be very few paths where the outcome is not an Islamist State (probably the best of all word choices) of one shape or another. The paths that successfully prevent it may be even worse. Both the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly outlined their goals for democracy in the Muslim world. They are going to get it. Of course, there is nothing preventing a democracy from voting to remove basic human rights.
The only thing I'm certain of at this point is an Islamist State poses a massive threat to the UAE, a big threat to India (because of the nuclear situation with Pakistan), a large threat to Israel, a pretty big threat to Europe, a small threat to Russia, and minimal threat to the US - which makes it ironic who is calling the shots.
Only problem for me is that it clearly states they have no interest in performing terror attacks in the west (although they would condone it). I'm not sure how it lines up with what just happened in Paris.
Put another and much more snarky way: This is meaningless, feel-good sophistry.
If we described domestic terrorists (bomb makers, mass shooters, killers, etc) as 'that waste that killed a bunch of people in X during Y' and never /ever/ published their names (in the news anyway, court transcripts would need to show them) then it would make those actions a lot less sexy.
In that same way, we should also call the extremists in the middle east that; possibly picking an arbitrary flavor word that is of no relation to them just so we can make a distinction. There are /quite/ a few extremist groups in that area of the world.
Got a citation for that?
Even if what you're saying were true, it could be more charitably described as "not using a term that shares a spelling with one of the mostly commonly used words in the English language".
[Note: I'm citing these examples to point out that a shift in terminology does not usually result in a shift in attitudes. Which means... I'm not citing these examples to start an argument on the particular topics of the examples.]
The Rote Armee Fraktion / Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe. They were violent Marxist terrorists in West Germany from the late sixties and continuing about two decades. The German government refused to refer to the group by its chosen name. Baader-Meinhof Group implies a criminal syndicate tied to two lead personalities, and shoves away implications of ideological motives. The RAF, however, remains to this day mostly known by its own chosen name.
Homosexual / Gay. "Gay" was originally taken up by men in the sixties to refer to their sexual identity as something less medical than "homosexual" (then defined as a mental illness) and less negative/alienating than "queer." But it came to be an insult, used by the sort of people who assume the essence of homosexuality to be bad... So any word for it becomes an insult among such people.
Liberal / Progressive. This example is specific to American politics: in most of the rest of the world, these words have separate meanings and are not conflated. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose ideas would have previously been called "progressive", identified himself as a "liberal" loudly and often, cementing a shift in the word's common-use meaning. At the time, it made him more palatable to voters who would have balked at a the more radical implications of "progressive." But now, the same people who disliked progressivism dislike liberalism (American) on the same basis.
Moron / Idiot / Imbecile / Retarded. Each of these words was originally a clinical term with a specific meaning. Now each is an insult, and new clinical terms have been decided upon by the medical community in aggregate.
Well, those old Russian propaganda experts knew, that its important to deny them their prefered words like "Islamic" and "State", but instead call them with a bad word, that accidentally is also an acronym of their name.
PS: consortiumnews is also using Daesh
The spelling is something between Dash and Desh... Daesh is the closest and its a poor substitute, if the aim is to not call them a state. Now, we are just calling them a country.
https://plus.google.com/111448954253951919974/posts/Ujs3zjbs...