Newsletters
Twenty-five years after two airplanes tore into the World Trade Center and changed the vocabulary of the planet, we are still fighting over the words.
Terrorism. Islam. State.
And, in Türkiye, four particularly radioactive letters:
"ISIS."
You have wandered into dangerous semantic territory if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hears you saying them out loud. He has a reason, and that is not hard to understand.
Erdogan firmly prefers the word "Daesh" when mentioning the terrorist group. Not sometimes. Not merely as a regional synonym. He objects to the ISIS and ISIL acronyms because both expand into names containing two words; he refuses to concede to the killers: Islamic State.
He could hardly have been clearer.
“Such a terrorist group cannot be linked with Islam in any way,” Erdogan told journalists as he returned from the U.N. General Assembly in 2016.
Then came the objection:
“Abbreviations such as ISIL or ISIS contain the words ‘Islamic State.’ This is unacceptable. That's why we call them Daesh.”
There it is.
This isn't an argument about acronyms. It is an argument about ownership.
Who owns Islam? Established Muslim states that work for the welfare of their citizens, or a group of people who know nothing but killing and violence?
Who gets to define a state? And who gets to name the predators?
September 11 made those questions brutally unavoidable.
The men who hijacked those airplanes claimed religion as justification for mass murder. The West spent the next quarter-century trying—sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes disastrously—to distinguish Islam from the killers committing atrocities in its name.
Then came the organization Western television audiences learned to call ISIS.
By 2014, its gunmen had carved an obscene empire across Syria and Iraq, declared a caliphate and appropriated two extraordinarily powerful words: "Islamic" and "state."
Erdogan wanted neither surrender.
Hence Daesh, derived from the Arabic name for the organization and stripped of the linguistic grandeur the terrorists craved.
For Erdogan, this wasn't cosmetic. It was ideological. Calling these men the “Islamic State” granted them, however inadvertently, precisely what they wanted: an Islamic identity and the dignity of statehood.
And Erdogan wasn't alone in recognizing the problem. Western governments and military officials increasingly used “Daesh” as well, precisely because ISIS, or Daesh as the Turkish state prefers, had turned its own name into propaganda. Even the American government publicly stressed that the organization was neither legitimately Islamic nor legitimately a state.
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t buy the name, either. In Parliament in December 2015, he said the group was neither a true representation of Islam nor a state and announced that Britain would follow France in calling it “Daesh” rather than “Isil.”
But here's where journalism enters the saloon, carrying a loaded revolver called clarity.
Most English-language readers know ISIS.
Tell them “Daesh” without explanation, and some will reasonably wonder whether another collection of lunatics has entered the story.
That is where politics must stop, and editing must begin.
Call them Daesh. Call them terrorists. Call them the diseased offspring of fanaticism, war and geopolitical catastrophe.
But on the first reference, tell the reader:
"Daesh, known in the West as ISIS."
Done.
No theological concession. No recognition of a caliphate. No surrender to terrorist branding.
And perhaps that is the useful lesson on this grim silver anniversary.
September 11 didn't merely begin wars. It began wars over language—over whether terrorism had a religion, whether civilizations were fighting, whether invasions were liberation, whether torture was “enhanced interrogation,” whether insurgents were terrorists, and whether terrorists could declare themselves a state simply by stealing enough land and murdering everyone who disagreed.
Words became weapons because words always were weapons.
Erdogan understands that perfectly.
His anger at “ISIS” is therefore neither mysterious nor irrational. He hears something many Western ears have stopped hearing: Islamic State.
“This is unacceptable,” he said.
And that’s an argument worth hearing.
Twenty-five years after September 11, we should at least have learned that much.
Call evil whatever you please.
Just tell the reader what the hell you're talking about.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
6 min read
