Islamic State beware – it’s Cameron’s full-spectrum renaming campaign

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/03/islamic-state-cameron-full-spectrum-bbc

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Amid all the shocking images from Syria, there was one the other week that took a chastening new tack. It showed a group of rebels from the town of Kafranbel – which resists both Assad and Isis – holding up a huge banner. This alluded to a certain au courant Vanity Fair cover. “Caitlyn!” it read. “We would write Kafranbel with a C, if it meant, like you, we would be free. Maybe liberated Cafranbel?”

Back then, I glossed this discomfiting attempt to give their plight a celebrity angle as effectively saying: “Did we get your attention yet, shitheads?” (Though of course, the Syrians’ version was the mannerly and elegant way of making that point.)

Still, time moves on. Were these people to wish to convey the same message this week, I would recommend the creation of a banner reading something along the lines of “Cameron! We would be very relaxed about whatever the BBC called Islamic State, if it meant, like you, we would be free.”

If you wanted to know what a smorgasbord of MPs call Isis, this was the very epicentre of that vital debate

And so to the “full spectrum” of the prime minister’s much-vaunted full-spectrum response to the Tunisian terror murders. At one end of the spectrum, he and a bewildering number of MPs and government ministers are attempting to get the BBC to change their editorial policy on using the term Islamic State. On Monday Cameron used a Today programme appearance to criticise the broadcaster’s use of the term. This built on a letter sent to the BBC by 120 MPs, including the London mayor, Boris Johnson, and the home affairs select committee chair, Keith Vaz, which also attempted to meddle in the business of BBC editors.

At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, Cameron is considering thinking about air strikes on Isis in Syria, but he is obviously waiting a couple of months to see the results of the Labour leadership election before getting too bogged down in that one.

I’ll level with you: I’ve seen fuller spectrums. Still, I hope that even stating that view will create another useful and hugely important diversion at this time of linguistic crisis. Ideally, a number of legislators will now take the time to write a letter to the readers’ editor to take issue with my failure to use the correct plural – namely, spectra. I will then expend a seemly amount of energy cordially explaining that it is increasingly acceptable in this day and age to use spectrums. That should take us into August, at which point the good burghers of Kafranbel are advised that everyone basically goes on their hollibobs anyway. Maybe they could come back with some sort of Premier League-related banner on 1 September?

MPs will still be on their summer recess then, but it’s not as if they could be described as being meaningfully present even when they’re in situ. To watch Thursday’s Commons debate on Britain and international security was to watch displacement activity of self-satirising proportions. Unless there was a covert competition to come up with the lamest possible answer to the old inquiry “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” this was the political equivalent of the child who is confused by the new toy and therefore plays with the box instead. If you wanted to know what a smörgåsbord of MPs call Isis, and what they reckon the BBC ought to call Isis, this really was the place to be. Indeed, I would go so far as to say it was the very epicentre of that vital debate. The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman noted drily that Alex Salmond declared “We could actually achieve something together” – and by that he was referring to getting the BBC to say Daesh instead of Islamic State. Speak for England, Alex!

Related: BBC to review use of 'Islamic State' after MPs protest against term

Perhaps the best analogue for this sort of diversionary irrelevance came in the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the US Congress’s chairman of the Committee on House Administration felt a response was needed to France’s opposition to the war. He ordered all three House eateries to expunge French fries and French toast from their menus, and to call them freedom fries and freedom toast instead. A formal statement was issued. The upshot? The French embassy pointed out that French fries are thought to have been invented in Belgium. Oh, and we invaded Iraq and whatnot.

That moment was memorably covered at the time in the brilliant David Rees cartoon strip Get Your War On. “Freedom Fries???” one character demanded. “OK, I have a question - is the War on Terrorism over? Because – I sure as hell want to know that ALL THE TERRORISTS IN THE WORLD HAVE BEEN CAPTURED before legislators actually take the time to rename their GODDAMN CAFETERIA FOOD!”

It need hardly be stated that people will have differing views on the best way to deal with Isis. Many emboldened by the first Conservative election win for 23 years will seek to back that up with the first war win for 33. The push for air strikes will harden, as will resistance to the idea. Many will even think the best response is none at all, and certainly not the assault on civil liberties that – for the floundering political thinker – has tended to follow terrorist attacks as surely as night follows day.

But there can be no one remotely intelligent – with the baffling exception of all the parliamentary blowhards blathering on this week – who imagines that the most visible response to the problem ought to be a debate about what the BBC calls Isis. It brings a new definition to the term proxy war, and coming alongside the steady stories of cutting (or indeed shutting) the BBC, it ought to be viewed with deep suspicion.

Furthermore, the fear is that far from being capable of conceiving of anything in terms of a spectrum, Cameron has simplistic ideas of extremism that are preventing him from forming the complex foreign policy that the problem of Isis requires. Instead of facing up to the role of a war he voted for in creating the situation he now faces, and the necessity of working at home and abroad with people he appears to have written off as terminally unsavoury, he prefers to flap about in the shallows of nomenclature, making obvious points about “poisonous ideology”. You could scarcely dignify it as a doctrine, but given the prime minister’s obsession with names, perhaps we might settle on “unrealpolitik”.