Yesterday, speaking about ISIS (or as he prefers to refer to it–ISIL), President Obama repeated his claim, “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
Unfortunately he is wrong and his stubborn refusal to see the world as it is puts America and her allies in grave danger. ISIS is as Islamic as the Nazis were German. ISIS and other Islamic extremists have cowed, silenced, or killed moderate Muslims, just as the Nazis did to moderate Germans.
The challenge for the West is to reconcile the desire to protect religious liberty for all, with the reality that Islam is a religion fundamentally at odds with such a concept.
Muslims interpret the Qur’an as describing Islam as both a religion and as a state. Some of the most powerful official organs of Islam–including the Saudi Religious Ministry–export Wahhabism, one of the most conservative forms of Sunni Islam, in support of a long term goal to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
Tens of thousands of Saudi Religious Ministry-funded Wahhabist madrassas teach radical Islam to eager recruits, providing new foot soldiers ready to strap on a suicide vest or hack off a head or two. These soldiers support the most violent and aggressive transnational actors, such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and others–all for the glory of Allah and the feeling of empowerment gained from killing and torturing innocents.
Such non-state actors will stop at nothing to establish the caliphate. They gain notoriety through beheadings, bombings, arson, torture , and slaughter of innocent civilians–not only in their own countries, but in free nations that have given them access through a misguided desire to protect individual liberty, without understanding that Islam rejects individual liberty. These self-appointed armies of Islam use their notoriety to neutralize moderate Muslims through fear and intimidation and to recruit more to their cause.
Increasingly ISIS is the pointy end of Islam. The American President may not want to accept that America is at war with Islam; but a growing part of Islam is a war with America, her allies, and the very concept of religious liberty.
