Daesh: The word ISIS doesn’t want you to say — and why politicians are using it more than ever
BY JASON SILVERSTEIN NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 9:01 PM
Daesh: The Word ISIS Doesn’t Want You to Say
Want to drive a terrorist into a frenzy? Try calling him the D-word.
Western leaders — most recently French President Francois Hollande — have begun using a silly-sounding phonetic term for Islamic militants that apparently makes the madmen manic: Daesh.
President Obama used the word earlier this week in a speech at the G-20 summit in Turkey. In the past month, U.S. Secretary of State Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius also dropped “Daesh” in speeches.
On Wednesday, Hollande slipped it into his address about raids on terrorists, saying “Daesh is guilty” of last week’s Paris massacre.
The terror group prefers to be known as the Islamic State, and is averse to any acronyms, especially one politicians are now using more often.
The group better known as ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State reportedly hates “Daesh” so much that its brutes have threatened to cut out the tongue of anyone using it.
So what’s the deal with Daesh?
The world’s most feared terror group is already known by several names, which media and politicians use interchangeably. First, there’s the Islamic State, which seems to be the favorite name of the radicals themselves, because it legitimizes their apocalyptic ambition of a bloody Islamic regime. The Islamic State name is often used in the group’s propaganda videos.
Then there are two acronyms: ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, referring to an area near the Mediterranean shore).
President Obama and French President Francois Hollande have recently used the term in prominent speeches.
But then comes Daesh (die-EESH). It is also an acronym, short for — take a deep breath — Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham, which is the full Arabic term for what English speakers translate as the Islamic State.
In other words, Daesh might as well be written as DAESH and understood the same way as the names ISIS or ISIL.
As Arabic translator Alice Guthrie explained in an exhaustive Free Word article this year, acronyms are rarely used at all in Arabic, so any acronym already sounds ridiculous to many Arabic speakers.
Worse yet, the acronym Daesh is nearly identical to the Arabic word “dais,” meaning something that crushes or tramples. That’s an ominous definition on its own, but not the one this self-aggrandizing group wants in its quest for Islamic rule.
But in the wake of the Paris massacre, the word now seems to be in its prime. With Obama, Hollande and other leaders using this verbal jab while holding the world’s attention, Daesh just might be the new ISIS.
jsilverstein@nydailynews.com
