The danger of saying ISIS is not Islam
September 16, 2014 – Liz Lightstone
So I’ve been thinking about this a lot and posted this morning on twitter about David Cameron’s comment (“they are monsters, not Muslims”). I’m very concerned by growing reprise that “Islamic State” (IS) is not Islam, that they are not Muslims. I can understand where it’s coming from but its a very dangerous form of political correctness. Clearly not all Muslims support IS, nor are all terrorists Muslim. But there is no doubt that IS say they are acting on behalf of Islam, they are Muslims and they want to establish an Islamic Caliphate.
If you detach their monstrous ideology from what we like to think of as Islam, then do you detach from the Muslim community responsibility for denouncing it? I have no problem if moderate Muslims — as some have done (albeit late in the day) — stand up and say that IS does not represent what they believe to be Islam. I similarly say that Naturei Karta, the “ultra-Orthodox” anti Zionist Jews — who by the way simply throw words, not stones, not swords and are nonviolent — do not represent Judaism in any form that I know. But I want the moderates to stand up and say it.
More importantly, do you, by saying IS is not Islam, they’re not Muslims, detach from the Muslim community at large the responsibility for helping prevent radicalisation which we know full well goes on in certain mosques and on campuses? (It is astonishing how many campuses world wide have HUGE investment from Saudi and Qatar and huge investment in BDS, anti Israel, and radicalisation programmes.)
I am not blaming any particular Muslim community but just as I hung my head in shame when extremist Jews murdered that poor young man in Jerusalem after the death of the three Jewish teenagers, so the Muslim community worldwide must say, not that IS is an Israeli / CIA conspiracy (as Iran currently claiming) but that something is rotten within the Muslim world and it must be stopped.







