Letters | 9 July 2015

The case for Daesh

Sir: For once the admirable Rod Liddle has got it completely wrong (‘You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State’, 4 July). We absolutely shouldn’t call the homoerotic, narcissistic death cult ‘Islamic State’ — not because it offends ordinary Muslims, nor because it has nothing to do with Islam (it has everything to do with Islam) but because it legitimises and validates the preposterous project. The media has a responsibility not to run terrorist propaganda unchallenged. Politicians, including the Prime Minister, are starting to wise up to this and should be applauded for doing so. We are in an information war with our enemies. Let us take our lead from the Arabs, who understand the Middle East rather better than we do, and call them Daesh — precisely because the terrorists don’t want to be called by this pejorative word. We don’t need to be doing the terrorists’ work for them.