Word games

I agree with Nick. Very much so in fact.

Here are some extracts:

The BBC looks like it is buckling under political pressure, as it so often does. Instead of telling Cameron that his behaviour [on 'Today'] demeaned his office, the Today programme was referring to the ‘so-called Islamic State’ this morning. If this carries on, the BBC will soon be reporting on ‘the supposedly Democratic Republic of Congo’ and ‘the alleged Netherlands’. Sycophantic MPs, meanwhile, are using ‘Daesh’ in the Commons. No one, not Cameron, the SNP, Lucas, Johnson or Goldsmith admitted that they were asking the public to engage in fruitless lying. Not one could acknowledge that their word games made distinctions without differences. 

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All the euphemisms politicians demand we must use to avoid calling Islamic State ‘Islamic State’ [ISIS, ISIL, Daesh] therefore call Islamic State ‘Islamic State’. How can they not, for that is its name? And it is no more up to outsiders to change a group’s name than it is up to you to change the names of your acquaintances. Assuming the politicians know what they are doing, they must believe that many voters will not know what ‘Isil’ and ‘Isis’ stand for, or only Arabic speakers will understand the meaning of ‘Daesh’. In other words, they are relying on ignorance and hoping to foster ignorance too. 

Why the lies? Why the resort to the magical belief that you can change the world by changing language? 

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The propaganda motive is, as the SNP says, to reassure hundreds of millions of Muslims that they are in no way implicated in Islamic State’s crimes, a sentiment so obvious it should not even need to be stated. But it provides reassurance by inventing a fairy story, which damages both Western governments and moderate Muslims when its falsehoods are exposed. To say that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam is like saying Stalin’s Soviet Union had nothing to do with socialism, or the Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism. Islamic State has nothing to do with most varieties of Islam, just as Stalinism had nothing to do with most varieties of socialism, but Islamic State has everything to do with Salafist Sunni Islam, which has spread its ultra-puritan, ultra-reactionary literalist interpretation of the myths of early Islam across the world.