What about the 200,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians who used to live in Aleppo alone?  Syriac (Aramaic) is their language of Litturgy, or are you too fixated on Moslems to understand that? 

It''s not just Muslims, but Syriac Orthodox and Yazidis who are suffering equally as badly.

The irony is that this is the modern version of the language spoken by Christ.

"Peace summarises everything in Islam, because it means

submitting your will to God,

so you acquire peace through it," he said.

"When I'm following its [i.e. ISLAM's] teachings,

I know that my own actions are in line     with what my creator wants,

and hence I am at peace with myself, [with] my community and the rest of the world."

"Mr Yunus has been encouraging peaceful community bridging since starting his post as Darwin's Islamic leader in 2014."

When I mentioned the Syrian Orthodox and Yazidis, I meant to include the other minorities.

This may come as a surprise to you, but ISIS has very few allies, and that includes Muslims who don't even regard them as Muslim.

John_Taverner wrote on Jan 6^th, 2016 at 2:44pm:



John_Taverner,

That is a lie [of ignorance ?].

All of the people [every single one] who have died as a result of ISIS have been 'infidels' [as defined by ISIS, and, as defined by ISLAM itself].

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

I understand you directed your comments at Yadda, and I would normally let my comment stand, but you have added the highlighted statement. It reads as cultural relativism, and the defenders and appeasers of Islam pull this one all the time. It is to say all Islam is no worse than other cultures. Sorry, can't accept that after twenty years of atrocities in the name of Allah.

John_Taverner wrote on Jan 8^th, 2016 at 7:26am:


Daesh is an acronym, that also includes statehood

On a related note, this article is very well written and full of info.  It's written by a professional Arabic translator all the ways that the world is laughing at "Daesh"

still got to remove url's

So what does Daesh really mean? Well, D.A.E.SH is a transliteration of the Arabic acronym formed of the same words that make up I.S.I.S in English: 'Islamic State in Iraq and Syria', or 'لدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام' ('al-dowla al-islaamiyya fii-il-i’raaq wa-ash-shaam'). That’s the full name chosen by the organisation, and – when used in full – it’s definitely how they want to be referred to. In Arabic, just like in English, that phrase consists of six words, four of which make it into the acronym (‘in’ and ‘and’ are omitted) : 'دولة dowla' (state) + 'إسلامية islaamiyya' (Islamic) + 'عراق i’raaq' (Iraq) + 'شام shaam'. That last word, 'shaam', is variously used in Arabic to denote Damascus (in Syrian dialect) ‘Greater Syria’ / the Levant, or Syria – hence the US-preferred acronym ISIL, with the L standing for Levant. In Arabic there is a single letter for the sound 'sh', hence our transliteration of the acronym having five letters, not four. And the vowel which begins the word 'islaamiyya' becomes an 'a' sound when differently positioned in a word, hence the acronym being pronounced 'da’ish' when written in Arabic, and the 'a' coming over into our transliteration of the acronym. Of course the amazing Arabic letter 'ع' which begins the word for 'Iraq' is unpronounceable to an anglophone, and can’t be written in Latin letters, hence the use of an 'e' (or occasionally an ’e) in the transliteration.

...

And so if the word is basically 'ISIS', but in Arabic, why are the people it describes in such a fury about it? Because they hear it, quite rightly, as a challenge to their legitimacy: a dismissal of their aspirations to define Islamic practice, to be 'a state for all Muslims’ and – crucially – as a refusal to acknowledge and address them as such. They want to be addressed as exactly what they claim to be, by people so in awe of them that they use the pompous, long and delusional name created by the group, not some funny-sounding made-up word. And here is the very simple key point that has been overlooked in all the anglophone press coverage I’ve seen: in Arabic, acronyms are not anything like as widely used as they are in English, and so arabophones are not as used to hearing them as anglophones are. Thus, the creation and use of a title that stands out as a nonsense neologism for an organisation like this one is inherently funny, disrespectful, and ultimately threatening of the organisation’s status. Khaled al-Haj Salih, the Syrian activist who coined the term back in 2013, says that initially even many of his fellow activists, resisting Daesh alongside him, were shocked by the idea of an Arabic acronym, and he had to justify it to them by referencing the tradition of acronyms being used as names by Palestinian organisations (such as Fatah). So saturated in acronyms are we in English that we struggle to imagine this, but it’s true.

All of this means that the name lends itself well to satire, and for the arabophones trying to resist Daesh, humour and satire are essential weapons in their nightmarish struggle. But the satirical weight of the word as a weapon, in the hands of the Syrian activists who have hewn it from the rock of their nightmare reality, does not just consist of the weirdness of acronyms. As well as being an acronym, it is also only one letter different from the word 'daes داعس' , meaning someone or something that crushes or tramples. Of course that doesn’t mean, as many articles have claimed, that 'daesh' is 'another conjugation' of the verb ‘to crush or trample’, nor that that is 'a rough translation of one of the words in the acronym' – it’s simply one letter different from this other word. Imagine if the acronym of 'Islamic State in Iraq and Syria' spelt out ‘S.H.I.D’ in English: activists and critics would certainly seize the opportunity to refer to the organisation as ‘poo’ – but I think it’s safe to say that no serious foreign media outlet would claim that 'poo' was another conjugation of the verb 'shid', nor a rough translation of it. Of course, that analogy is an unfair one, given the hegemonic global linguistic position of English, not to mention the heightened currency of scatological words; but there is a serious point to be made here about the anglophone media’s tendency to give up before it’s begun understanding non-European languages.