Are you doing your part in the fight against ISIS? Are you, for instance, refusing to call them ISIS? For a while now, world leaders have preferred not to say ISIS, which is sinister and glamorous and sounds like the villain in a budget superhero movie, and opted instead for ISIL, which sounds like conjunctivitis medicine. But it turns out that what ISIS really hates is being referred to as Daesh, an Arabic acronym that sounds a bit like daes, someone who tramples or crushes, and dahes, someone who sows discord. Please, they're begging, don't call us Daesh, we hate it, it's our only weakness; get Suzanne Moore to stop saying "Daesh" in the Guardian and we'll do anything you want.
What other things might ISIS hate? We have to find out, so we can start doing it immediately. Start with the obvious: Muslims hate pigs, right? Racists have been throwing bacon at mosques for years now, but after the attacks in Paris one inventive Californian proudly posted evidence (or possibly an old, unrelated photo) of the row of pig's heads he'd supposedly laid across his street to protect his neighborhood from the global Islamic menace. (Question one: Did he really think Muslims couldn't just step over them? Question two: What happens when he needs to drive somewhere? Question three: Where do you even get 20 pig's heads, and what happens to the rest of the pig?)
What else? You pour warm beer and double cream into a single funnel, the tube coiling directly into your open mouth: I bet those guys in ISIS are really gonna hate this! Sorry, honey, I know you don't like it when I leave the toilet seat up, but ISIS dislikes it even more. We could take in Syrian refugees, we could try to stop the flow of arms and cash fueling the conflict, or we could watch Family Guy while pissing in the bathtub, something that famously makes ISIS absolutely furious. Once citizens in wartime were told to cut back and make do, sacrifice their private needs for the national effort; now if ISIS hates the West for its smug, childish brutality, we're going to win by being more smug, more childish, more brutal, more bloated, more obnoxious, more selfish, more stupid than we were before.
This is the world that the Open Letter to ISIS on Facebook inhabits, at once blindly pigheaded and incredibly lonely. Statistically speaking, you have probably either seen or composed one of these: Thousands of people, apparently under the strange misapprehension that all their friends have joined ISIS since the last school reunion, have taken to the internet to directly address the masked instantiations of metaphysical evil.
Finchie's open letter
Some of these have become inexplicably popular. For instance, the most recent to go viral, prompted by an ISIS video that included Ireland in its "coalition of devils" (along with other similarly aggressive imperial powers as Switzerland, Kosovo, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). "What's the craic lads!" our author writes, immediately justifying a massive retaliatory strike against Dublin. He explains to ISIS that the Irish are peaceful folk, unlike that other country immediately to the east, but should ISIS try to attack anything other than Bono's house or County Leitrim "in the name of Alan, (or what ever he's called)," they will "beat the shit out of all of you using mammies wooden spoon."
The letter has done the usual rounds, being featured on the Lad Bible and on countless of those creepily algorithmic clickbait sites—occasionally with the baffling title "This Irish Guy's Open Letter to ISIS Has Everyone But ISIS Laughing." Because ISIS aren't laughing. They read it, and they're really pissed off.
But that was, at least nominally, only a bit of fun. There are others—too many others—which are either deadly serious or a joke far more finely and deftly ironic than any of us deserve.
An open letter from a U.S. Marine to ISIS.
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