"Daesh" is short for "al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham", which means Islamic State(or Nation) of Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant or Syria)... so basically ISIS. [1]<p>So then, the point of view here is that you're not referring to it as a state when you use words from a non-Western European language?<p>I think it would be better to spin it as an armed group serving it's dictatorial leader, the "Caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, by calling it something like "Al-Baghdadi's Army."<p>Much better to leave Islam, Iraq and Syria out of it.<p>Then you have at least one clear, achievable goal: <a href="http://imgur.com/UcIhJmU" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/UcIhJmU</a><p>[1] <a href="http://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/on-the-origin-of-the-name-daesh-the-islamic-state-in-iraq-and-as-sham/" rel="nofollow">http://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/on-the-ori...</a>
I believe strongly in renaming things as an effective marketing and positioning technique. Rebranding the inheritance tax as the death tax is a good example.<p>Does anyone have any other examples?
The same strategy gave us the term "Nazi", according to Mark Forsyth:<p>"[Nazi] was a derogatory term for a backwards peasant – being a shortened version of Ignatius, a common name in Bavaria, the area from which the Nazis emerged. Opponents seized on this and shortened the party's title Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, to the dismissive "Nazi"."
I'm posting this on HN because what the French media are doing (according to the article) amounts to something of an elegant SEO hack: if we all stopped calling them by their wannabe 'Islamic State' moniker, and uniformly started using the <i>Daeshi</i> label instead, that would tend to force the search rankings on their their various propaganda videos/websites down -- or force them to start using it if they want their rankings to come back up.<p>Side note: Title abbreviated slightly to fit the 80-char limit.
A common refrain you read online lately is that ISIS is not Islamic, usually by moderate Muslim apologists. The awkward truth however is that actually moderate Muslims are really the unIslamic ones, and that ISIS is Islamic to a fault. ISIS follows a very literalist and precise interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence and tradition, whereas moderate Muslims trying to distance themselves from ISIS are much more lax in this regard.<p>So Obama or the French government saying ISIS is not Islamic sounds pretty silly and requires some serious cognitive dissonance on the part of all involved in this charade. The fact of the matter is the Islamic State is just that: Islamic. Muslims who play this doublethink game are finding it harder and harder to keep all the contradictions in what their religion teaches and the values they hold aligned.