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Friday, October 17, 2014

ISIS Has Kiwis jumping at shadows

Islamophobia or just downright stupidity? According to TVNZ news, New Zealand businesses with names like Isis or Issis are getting resistence from customers and having to change their names.
There are dozens of New Zealand businesses operating under the name Isis or Issis, which is the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess.
This reminds me of a tale I heard 30 years ago about a company that had spent years building up their diet food business around a product called Aids. Their business got wiped out by the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s. Ironically one of the early names for AIDS was "Slim" as late term sufferers lost a nearly all their body weight.

Now suddenly the world is focussing on the organisation sometimes called "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" or ISIL, sometimes the Levant gets translated as Syria and thus ISIL becomes ISIS.  Except, of course, this isn't even the name of the organisation. It's name is in Arabic and is more accurately represented as ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fīl-ʻIraq wa ash-Shām (I have no idea what that initialises as, but the French Government has started referring to them as 'Daesh').

Suddenly we are told that people are refusing to do business with businesses with names similar to ISIS. How stupid can you get? Daesh isn't I.S.I.S.; I.S.i.S. isn't Isis. Isis isn't Issis. None of these businesses are related in any way to Daesh.

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