Daesh activist in Egypt . Image seed : Flickr / Day Donaldson
After last week’sstring of ISIS attacksin Beirut , Baghdad and Paris , global leaders like François Hollande and John Kerry have started to refer to the competitive Islamist radical as “ Daesh . ”
Why the name change matters
Daesh militants in Egypt. Image Source: Flickr/Day Donaldson
As anyone who has scan “ Romeo and Juliet ” knows , names count : the ways we mouth about thing and multitude can change the way we sense about and treat them , and thus vary realism . Language , therefore , can be a potent ( and cheap ) instrument in any counterterrorism scheme . Regarding ISIS , by referring to them as such , we effectively concede that theyarea state , and that they do symbolize Islam , which gives the group more legitimacy than they would otherwise have .
Wrote French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius , “ This is a terrorist grouping and not a state … the terminal figure Islamic State blurs the lines between Islam , Muslims , and Islamists . ”
By lurch from ISIS to Daesh , we reject the group ’s claims to have established a caliphate — which many Muslimsalready reject — as well as their affiliation to Islam .
similarly , Zhan says that such a shift can also aid the United States forge better insurance policy . “ By using a term that cite the Arabic name and not an English translation , ” Zhan writes , “ American policy God Almighty can potentially inoculate themselves from inherent biases that could affect their decisiveness making . ” In create this argument , Zhan cite a University of Chicago study which constitute that thinking in a extraneous oral communication reduce misinform biases and can thus aid in kick upstairs more analytical thinking .
This change in terminology has already had ripple effects on the solid ground : according toNBC , Daesh has reportedly threatened to “ foreshorten out the tongue ” of anyone it hears using the term .
Of course , discursive shifts alone can not solve the job of Daesh , or the conditions which yield way to their rise , but they can countermine the group ’s rhetorical claims to reality — and that matter . Said large Muslim sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah , “ The problem is that even if you defeat these ideas militarily by killing people , if you do n’t get the better of the thought intellectually , then the ideas will reemerge . ”
