- When it comes to ISIS it is sufficient to note that in the thousands of
news reports concerning this group, the public are not told that “Islamic
State” was the name that twentieth-century scholars of Islam in the West
gave to the first politicial-military entity created by the founder of Islam,
which on his death came to be known as “the Caliphate”. The connection
with 1400 years of Islamic history is further concealed by the media
(particularly the BBC) insisting on referring to the group as “so-called
Islamic State”. The BBC did not refer to the IRA as “the so-called Irish
Republican Army”, evidence that the problem with Islam and sectarian
violence in the West has already surpassed Britainʼs problem with
terrorism from Irish republicans that the terms of debate must be
deformed: if the BBC had thought that it would offend Irish people or
legitimize the IRA, they would have referred to the IRA as “the so-called
Irish Republican Army”. British MPs attempted to add a further level of
disassociation between Islam and the Islamic State by getting the BBC to
only refer to Islamic State as “Daesh” (see “BBC rejects MPsʼ calls to
refer to Islamic State as Daesh”, The Guardian, 2 Jul 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/02/bbc-rejects-mps-calls-to-
refer-to-islamic-state-as-daesh).
The efforts to conceal that Islamic State is Islamic is not the only
deformation of debate. The group known as “Boko Haram” do not call
themselves by that name. The name they use is “Group of the People of
Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad”. It is virtually impossible to find a
mainstream news source or even an anti-terrorism think tank which will
disclose that this is the true name of this group. These three reports all
give the name in Arabic: 1) “Is Islamic State Shaping Boko Haram
Media?”, BBC, 4 Mar 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-
31522469; 2) “Boko Haram: An Assessment of Strengths,
Vulnerabilities, and Policy Options”, National Consortium for the Study
of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Jan 2015,
https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_%20SMA-
AFRICOM_Boko%20Haram%20Deep%20Dive_Jan2015.pdf; 3) Alex
Thurston, “The Disease is Unbelief: Boko Haramʼs Religious and
dana p.
(Dana P.)
#1