08.30.2016 08:45 AM

My Prime Minister says the right things

Right here. Wonderful to see him getting a lot tougher on the biggest armed threat we all face.

Some of the (many things) I’ve written on the semantics previously, here.

Very, very pleased to see this. 

11 Comments

  1. doconnor says:

    Wouldn’t the biggest armed threat we face would be the thing that kills the most people in Canada with guns and believe that would be suicide tiggered by mental illness.

  2. Eric Weiss says:

    Yeah… Changing the term to refer to a terrorist group isn’t going to stop the terrorist group. It’s not getting tougher it’s semantics under guise of looking like you’re doing something when you’re really doing next to nothing.

    But I’m sure the ISIS leaders are lying awake at night thinking “ZOMG! I can’t believe Justin Trudeau is calling us Daesh! Maybe we should give up this whole caliphate idea and stop killing people.”

    • Ronald O'Dowd says:

      Bingo!

    • Peter says:

      This reminds me a bit of the Monty Python skit about a TV game show based on British chauvinism and prejudice. The contestants were asked to come up with the most insulting name for the Belgians. Third place went to “the Sprouts'”. Second place went to “the Phlegms”. The winner was “dirty rotten Belgian bastards”.

  3. Charlie says:

    To be fair though, people have been referring to ISIS as “Daesh” for some time now. Those with exposure to that region and the conflict understand that people refer to the group as Daesh in a derogatory manner and not as ISIS, which is a more formalizing — even legitimatizing — moniker. I’d say Trudeau is a little late on decision.

    John Kerry has been saying Daesh for a long time now.

    Basically, it comes down to a few things:

    1) Outside of that region, people have mainly been hearing the term “ISIS” when referring to the group and don’t know what Daesh is. It’s why Obama uses both terms when he refers to them just so the audience understands who he’s speaking of.

    2) We probably should’ve stopped using the term ISIS the minute we realized that detractors in the Arab world don’t actually see the group as a “state” of any sort but just parasites feeding off a civil war. We over sensationalized them and ended up beefing up their propaganda for recruitment by portraying them as some sort of anti-Justice League.

    3) The words “Islamic State” is huge political fodder in the US. Republicans view the cessation of the use of that term by certain authorities as being a placation to Muslims. The term ISIS now has more to do with domestic American politics than the actual group itself.

  4. dave constable says:

    Renaming Germans, Japanese, North Korean and Chinese fighters was a key to fighting those wars.

  5. Frank says:

    Lol, definitely “gloves off”, “putting the boot in” and giving them some aggro! I guess it’ll make the nut jobs so very, very, very angry that they’ll throw a tantrum and stop their religiously inspired butchery.

  6. doconnor says:

    Nothing says grown up like calling people insulting names.

  7. Ian Howard says:

    Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse
    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/world/middleeast/syria-civil-war-why-get-worse.html

    Read this and tell me how it makes a difference.

  8. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    Warren,

    Memo to the PM: this isn’t my government. It’s our government. And technically speaking, it’s HMG.

  9. Russell Sehn says:

    oh boy!! JT gets tough. He’s not gonna take no s–t!! right up the there Putin, that boy.

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