“Their narrative is caliphate, we’ve taken territory, we’re the future of true Islam, and on you go. And you have to find a way to counter that that’s effective and I think we’ve gotten pretty good at it.”
Nonsense. Not only have they not gotten pretty good at it, but there is nothing they are worse at doing. Kerry’s remarks here show why. He thinks that to call the Islamic State something else, such as “the world’s most evil terrorist group,” will deprive it of legitimacy. But if the United States government refuses to call the Islamic State the Islamic State, that will not prevent a single Muslim from joining it, because young Muslims don’t look to the United States government to tell them what is legitimately Islamic and what isn’t. Nor will it prevent the Islamic State from invoking Islamic texts and teachings to justify its actions and make recruits among Muslims, and the U.S. government has done absolutely nothing to counter that, because it is determined to maintain the fiction that Islam is a religion of peace, and refuses even to admit that the Islamic State makes recruits in this way.
“Kerry: To Avoid ‘Islamic’ or ‘State,’ Call ISIS ‘World’s Most Evil Terrorist Group,'” by Bridget Johnson, PJ Media, October 11, 2016:
Secretary of State John Kerry suggested referring to ISIS as “the world’s most evil terrorist group” so as to not use the acronym references to “Islamic” or “State.”
Kerry noted at the Virtuous Circle Conference on Monday in Silicon Valley that he “rarely” uses the terms “ISIS” or “ISIL” at all.
“I’ve been on a lot of campaigns to get everybody to say “Daesh” because it’s a pejorative in Arabic — the initials — and I haven’t won that campaign at all,” he added.
“But it’s just — you kind of resort to the use of those letters because it refers to a state — it’s the Islamic State — and it’s not a state. There’s nothing legitimate about it. There’s nothing Islamic about it. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s their title and we shouldn’t use it and I feel that very strongly,” Kerry continued. “But it has gained — it’s the recognized term and if you want people to know what you’re talking about, unfortunately, sometimes you are forced to.”
He stressed that “it would be great if we could get away from that, and the key is the media to begin really to call it something else.”
“The terrorist group Daesh — that would be the best moniker, I think,” he said. “Or the most evil — the world’s most evil terrorist group.”
Daesh also incorporates Islamic State, just in Arabic. It stands for al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham. It’s one letter away from the word “daes,” which means to crush or trample. ISIS hates the Daesh term and has threatened violence against people who use it.
“Anyway, it’s hard,” Kerry added. “Today’s media is so — it’s so labelized and it reduces everything into these simplistic things. It’s very, very hard to break out once something has stuck.”
Kerry also talked at the technology confab about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center “mostly focused on countering violent extremism.”
“And we have 131 employees authorized, I think we’re currently at about 68. Why are we not at full force? Because it’s pretty competitive out here and tough to get people… it’s hard to find the talent and fill the slots, number one. It’s just been a slower growth process than we would have liked,” he said of the department meant to counter terrorist propaganda online.
“We’re messaging and changing the narrative of ISIL, of Daesh. And countering that narrative very forcefully. We use a lot of defectors, a lot of survivors of Daesh’s brutality. And they are the people who are messaging. They are the communicators. They’re the people who are debunking the extraordinary lies of a fairly sophisticated Daesh operation, I might add. It’s quite amazing how effective they’ve been for a while in proselytizing propaganda and so forth,” Kerry said.
“Their narrative is caliphate, we’ve taken territory, we’re the future of true Islam, and on you go. And you have to find a way to counter that that’s effective and I think we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We know we have reduced recruits. We know we have cut financing. And I am absolutely convinced, not any exaggeration, that we are going to destroy ISIL as we know it now, in the sense that there’s still a few al-Qaeda folks around, but there’s not the day-to-day threat that existed. We’re moving on Mosul, we’re moving on Raqqa, we’re shrinking their space significantly. They haven’t taken one piece of territory and held it since May of last year and their leadership is being decimated person by person.”…