In rightly condemning the brutal and graphic murder of journalist James Foley by the “Islamic State,” President Obama insisted that “no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.”
Sadly, he’s wrong.
In reality, a fundamentalist interpretation of any religion can open the door to murder and massacre.
The problem isn’t just literalist interpretations of the Koran: The New Testament, the Jewish Torah and many other religious books contain explicit calls for disproportionate punishments and killing of nonbelievers.
It’s something people love to ignore. Just like Obama, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in condemning the IS, also insisted: “No religion condones the murder of civilians.”
Yet nothing is further from the truth. The IS “embrace[s] a harsh interpretation of Islamic sharia law,” reported the LA Times.
VICE News’ exposé on the group unequivocally documents the extreme religious views that guide its actions and its intent to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
Want more hints that there’s a huge religious component to the group? It named its head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the successor of Mohammad. It devotes much of its energy to slaughtering those who violate the literal dictates of sharia law.
Of course, since it operates in majority-Muslim lands, this means the Islamic State’s victims are mostly Muslims who don’t accept its fundamentalist ideology, along with Christians and others — but that hardly means this is not about faith.
It’s accurate enough to say that no modern, enlightened interpretation of faith teaches people to massacre innocents. So what? Literal fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts make plenty of room for murder and mayhem.
The IS interpretation of Islam is certainly fringe and fundamentalist, but it’s plainly rooted in a literal interpretation of the Koran. You can’t divorce the Islamic State from religion.
Yes, many Muslims have quite rightly condemned the IS. In the United Kingdom, for example, 100 Sunni and Shiite imams strongly denounced it as an “illegitimate, vicious group who do not represent Islam in any way.” The head of the Arab League did the same.
But condemning it isn’t enough. Exposing and debunking the way it picks and chooses to twist the overall message of religious texts is a vital part of defeating the root cause of the threat.
We won’t put an end to the jihadis’ rape, pillaging, beheading and slaughter without facing the facts about their religious appeal and motives.
To willfully misunderstand your enemy is to hand him an advantage. We need to stop lying about the jihadis’ sources of strength.
Eliyahu Federman has written for the Huffington Post, USA Today, Fox News and others.