France ditches the name ISIS, replacing it with a label the group hates

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/17/france-is-ditching-the-islamic-state-name-and-replacing-it-with-a-label-the-group-hates/?tid=pm_pop

by dreamweapon • 12 years ago

74 50 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

dreamweapon• 12 years ago

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 Daeshi 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.

Side note: Title abbreviated slightly to fit the 80-char limit.

metafex• 12 years ago

Make them the laughing stock of the world and nobody will take them serious anymore.

As bad as the things they do are, it can't get anymore classy for a countermeasure. No war on whatever really helps the people, but this hopefully opens some eyes.

zethraeus• 12 years ago

It's (positive) propaganda, and propaganda is effectively a social hack. A part of the social hack is its technical impact , but it's interesting independent of it. (And I'd love to see more analysis of the impact and stickiness of the hack). Thanks for posting it.

AJ007• 12 years ago

Is it propaganda or is it a honeypot?

darkstar9992• 12 years ago

Honeypot? How so? See who gets pissed off when you call them that?

zo14• 12 years ago

If anyone wants to jump on the band wagon for this new name, here is a start:

https://www.google.com/search?q=isis+daesh

https://www.google.com/search?q=isis+new+name+daesh

And perhaps the french could convince anonymous or 4chan to help out.

andrewtbham2• 12 years ago

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.

Does anyone have any other examples?

eru2• 12 years ago

Good example in which direction?

andrewtbham2• 12 years ago

I think it's effective rebranding for those wanting to repeal the tax. Fyi, I'm more interested in the marketing, than the politics.

So an example of the ineffective branding, from the book "positioning: the battle for your mind", is high fructose corn syrup. They suggested rebranding it to "corn sugar."

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

During the Obamacare debate in Congress, the administration was very careful to always refer to the individual mandate penalty as a "fee" or "penalty", never ever a "tax."

But when the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate, they did so under the government's power to tax.

conradfr• 12 years ago

Not sure as "good example" but in France there is a major effort to rebrand "video surveillance" (CCTV) as "video protection".

Also labeling anti-Zionism as antisemitism or hiding an antisemitic rhetoric by claiming it's only anti-Zionism is quite common.

lazyant• 12 years ago

"pro-life", "pro-choice", "ObamaCare", "War on terror", "fiscally responsible" etc, pretty much any other term in the talking points of politicians.

smorrow• 12 years ago

MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It used to be NMR or NMRI, but you know what people are like when they hear the word "nuclear".

carlob• 12 years ago

This is exactly the contrary of what Berlusconi once proposed: "let's brand all Fiat cars as Ferrari and their sales will soar".

herge• 12 years ago

Also, Daesh is a homophone with a french slang word for semen.

KevinBongart• 12 years ago

No, it isn't.

surement• 12 years ago

It is where I come from.

falsestprophet3• 12 years ago

"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]

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?

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."

Much better to leave Islam, Iraq and Syria out of it.

Then you have at least one clear, achievable goal: http://imgur.com/UcIhJmU

[1] http://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/on-the-ori...

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

Are they not doing all the things they're doing for Islam's sake (misguided or not)?

falsestprophet3• 12 years ago

Yeah, I would take their word for it that they are Muslims.

But in addition to being Muslims and generally really bad dudes, the principal thing they are doing is installing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the leader of a caliphate/country.

cjslep• 12 years ago

Al-Qaeda will publicly try to justify their actions using religious beliefs, ISIS does not try nearly as hard. I do not know if other Muslims consider ISIS "Takfir"[0] though.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jama%27at_al-Muslimin ...in the Muslim world Takfir is "generally used as a derogatory description for extremists that kill Muslims without sufficient religious justification".

colanderman5• 12 years ago

I think the point is, as the article points out, moreso that the group hates the name:

"The Associated Press recently reported that the group were threatening to cut cut out the tongues of anyone who used the phrase publicly, and AFP have noted that the term "Daeshi" has been used a derogatory term in some parts of the Middle East. Some analysts have suggested that the dislike of the term comes from its similarity to another Arabic word, دعس, or Das. That word means to trample down or crush."

falsestprophet3• 12 years ago

According to the Foreign Minister of the French Republic Laurent Fabius their point is

“This is a terrorist group and not a state," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters last week, according to France 24. "I do not recommend using the term Islamic State..."

My point is that they are still, basically, calling it the Islamic State, but just in Arabic.

Crito3• 12 years ago

I'm sure they'd hate to be called "The Coalition of Sissy Bomb-bait Cowards", but that doesn't mean we should call them that.

The public is already aware of who "ISIS" is, and what they do. I see no reason to introduce confusion (particularly with a word whose pronunciation isn't even clear to all native English speakers (such as myself)).

Edmeral• 12 years ago

Arabic by nature doesn't have many abbreviations like other languages because of it's lack of vowels, so abbreviations end up being a set a consonants that are hard to pronounce and don't sound "correct", so we don't use them often. The name "Daesh" is an exception, it's an abbreviation (although one letter gets changed a little bit) and it does sound "correct" but although it does contain the words Islamic and state, it doesn't have for an Arabic speaker like me the same effect as ISIS have for an English speaker

zokier• 12 years ago

On a slightly offtopic note, thanks for revealing the name in the (current) top comment so I don't need to click through the article just to get that. I'm almost certain that the lack of the new name in the title is completely intentional to gain more clicks.

ajbetteridge• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure none of us would actually bother to read the article if the name was in the title.

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

The way I see it is that journalists (directed by the French government in this case) like to use foreign terms to make the "enemy" more scary and different. We hear a lot about "jihad", "sharia", "burka", "fatwa" and now "daesh".

DonPellegrino• 12 years ago

Apparently part of the reason they hate it is that it sounds like complete gibberish to arabic speakers and the abbreviation is usually said in a very derogatory tone of voice.

lordlarm• 12 years ago

What does the actual word "Daesh" mean and why do they hate it?

darkstar9992• 12 years ago

Did you read the article? That would be a good start.

thinkpad20• 12 years ago

The article explains that, but in your defense, it takes quite a while to do that. It first mentions the word, and then doesn't explain its meaning or significance until another five paragraphs have gone by. This was a poor choice by the author, in my opinion.

colanderman5• 12 years ago

The same strategy gave us the term "Nazi", according to Mark Forsyth:

"[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"."

eru2• 12 years ago

You are sure it's not a play on the long established "Sozi" for Sozialdemokrat?

EDIT: I just checked. It's both. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi#Begriffsgeschichte_und_-v...

takeda• 12 years ago

What about just calling them Softcard?

genieyclo2• 12 years ago

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.

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.

IB885588• 12 years ago

Yes, the excuse reminds me of the (very apropos today) No True Scotsman fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge." Person B: "I am Scottish, and I put sugar on my porridge." Person A: "Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

zo14• 12 years ago

I'm curious... Do the Scottish have a book that states whether or not a Scotsman should eat porridge? Because if it does, and it's a book they follow for their Scottish belief system, then that throws a spanner in the whole comparison.

sneaky_ruds• 12 years ago

As a point of comparison, how do you feel about comments that Westboro Baptist Church is un-Christian?

genieyclo2• 12 years ago

I don't have any past experience as a Christian or know enough about Christianity to comment about that.

vernie• 12 years ago

...and you won't believe what happens next!

Meczch2• 12 years ago

I'm all in favor of this move...give them what they deserve

Meczch2• 12 years ago

I'm all for this renaming!! Give them what they deserve

France ditches the name ISIS, replacing it with a label the group hates

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