I don’t see why you’d have that right even if you were a Muslim.
Maybe, but at least I wouldn’t be infidelsplaining someone else’s religion to them.
There are plenty of non-muslims who know more about Islam than many, or even most, moslems do. And, certainly all the muslims who have made the conscious choice to join Da-esh think that it’s Islamic. They were muslims the day before the joined that group. Are we to think they suddenly became non-muslims once they joined?
I am not sure there is evidence to support that premise. I suspect a great number of the members joined so that they could freely loot, rape, and pillage, or to obtain protection for their own families, or because they would be guaranteed three squares a day, or for any number of non-religious reasons.
None of those is mutually exclusive.
Ha! Good one, seriously 
Let me address these in reverse order.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say a chef from the kitchen of the Four Seasons Hotel is invited to your office to cook you all lunch. He’s got the chef’s hat and uniform, Four Seasons’ equipment, the ID, he’s recognized by your coworkers as the hotel chef- the guy is undoubtedly the real deal. Ok, but then he proceeds to prepare some food, and you watch him include 4 cups of chicken shit along with other ingredients, and he tells you it is chicken salad.
Now, you’re not a chef, and he is, but can’t you still decide for yourself that, no matter what anybody says, that you just can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit? I’d stand by that observation, especially when the consequence of excessive credulity means eating a shit sandwich.
I don’t think it is usually my place to go around judging people’s claims of membership to this or that religion. But there are extreme examples where it is obvious that the claim isn’t true (and Islam-recognized prophets agree).
But what gives me the right? Pretty simple really, the 1st Amendment. I don’t believe ISIS is Islamic, and I am free to express my belief by virtue of being an American. You all are free to try to convince me otherwise, and some of you raise some pretty good points, but I remain unconvinced. To me, the answer is too obvious.
Now if I were, say, the Governor of Montana or a member of the House of Representatives or something, I might want to be a little more careful about what I say, especially if I am speaking in official capacity, lest my words be mistaken as the official position of the US. But wait!! President Obama declared ISIL not to be Islamic, during a formal address to the nation!
I don’t just bring my own opinion, I have the prophets and the POTUS on my side as well. No offense, but what are you guys bringing? I am not someone who ever complains about PC Police, but it does seem like little more than PC handwringing to say that we just have to take everyone’s word for what they say their religion is, even when they are leading an army of suicide bombers to commandeer large swaths of territory for their own profit, in contradiction of their own historical religious authorities. For that matter, ISIS apparently doesn’t care if its recruits are Islamic or not, see here. If you can shoot straight or otherwise help their cause, you can join. ISTM that when someone is joining a religious group, the idea is that they are, yanno, joining the religion.
I think ISIS is clearly about power, not religion. But if you want to eat ISIS’ shit sandwich, hey, it’s a free country…
Right. They became terrorists.
Funny - they don’t look Jewish.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah. Really I am talking about what I think, and Ramira got sucked into it. Let’s leave her out of this until/unless she comes back to speak on her own behalf. If she does, I hope she will share her opinion on whether she thinks Habukkuk and Obama are takfiris.
Yeah, I do think that words should have definitions and some very broad definition therefore must exist beyond mere self-identification. It’s why I am wishy-washy ( 
) on Farrakhan’s breakaway splinter of the old NOI. Accepting a prophet after Muhammed seems like a functional break to me, much like Babism/Baha’i. However since I think self-identification is the most important part of any such broad definition it becomes problematic, hence the wishy-washiness.
All of which a side issue to the OP’s claim, which I agree ( as per my link above where I briefly discuss ObL ) is more “No True Scotsman” territory.
ISIS is not Islamic, it’s Islamist. The first is a religious practice, the second is a political movement. If they were truly Islamic, they would be peacefully practicing their religion as do the majority of the world’s Muslims. But they are attempting to establish a political state (caliphate) through violence, murder and terrorism, which flies in the face of Islam’s teachings, much like the Crusader’s persecution of Islam was contrary to Christian doctrine.
False dichotomy.
There are shades of gray in anything, but the definition of Islamism has changed over the years from merely being a belief in Islam, to being a political movement that advocates a reordering of society to conform to Islamic beliefs, and to use whatever means achieves that end.
A) ISIS (or at least the thousands of individual people who make up ISIS) is Islamic by self-identification.
B) Islam (and the billions of individual people who make up Islam) is not ISIS.
Since B is true, any statements equating ISIS and Islam are not relevant to any reasonable discussion of the issue.
You can be Islamic and not Islamist, but you cannot be Islamist* without being Islamic. There is nothing unIslamic about wanting a state ordered around Islamic beliefs and practices.
*Assuming you are not so distorting the basic tenets of what is widely recognized as “Islam”. For example, if my religion claimed that Mohammed was the devil, it would be hard to accrept that religion as “Islam”.
The Devil can quote the Habakkuk to suit His purpose.
By that logic, any small minority is not part of the whole. The Amish living in PA are not Americans!
The two are not mutually exclusive. ISIS is an Islamist movement whose members are Muslims who subscribe to some extremist chauvinistic and violent doctrines about the nature and role of Islam in the world. That is a subset of the many diverse doctrines and cultures that are classified as “Islamic”.
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
If they were truly Islamic, they would be peacefully practicing their religion as do the majority of the world’s Muslims.
[/quote]
:dubious: Any time we start talking about who counts as “truly” part of a certain religion, the skirl of bagpipes echoes in the distance. This is classic oatmeal-flavored logical fallacy territory.
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
But they are attempting to establish a political state (caliphate) through violence, murder and terrorism, which flies in the face of Islam’s teachings, much like the Crusader’s persecution of Islam was contrary to Christian doctrine.
[/QUOTE]
Many of the authorities on Christian doctrine during the Crusades were just fine with persecution of Islam, just as some Muslim authorities these days support ISIS.
Nowadays the majority of people in general do agree that Song of Roland-type oppression of non-Christians in the Crusades and other medieval settings is a bad part of the history of Christianity as a whole, just as people in general agree that the activities of ISIS today are a bad part of the history of Islam as a whole. But that doesn’t mean that the Crusaders weren’t Christians or that ISIS terrorists aren’t Muslims, or that their respective movements are somehow disqualified from being considered part of their respective religions.
This thread is kind of heady-splody for me, because usually in threads about radical Islamist extremism I’m one of the people pushing back against insistent Islamophobic claims that radical Islamist extremism defines or equates to Islam itself in some essential or intrinsic way. Over and over again I have to point out that you can’t use radical Islamist extremism as functionally equivalent to global Islam as a whole.
Now all of a sudden we’ve got a Pit thread where it’s being claimed that radical Islamist extremism, at least of the ISIS flavor, doesn’t even count as part of Islam. 
That’s some pretty impressive swing in that there pendulum.
This is all just a dumb issue anyway. Let’s compare it to Christian movements.
Some Protestants claim that Catholics, Mormons, and other non-Protestants are not actually Christians. They are mostly viewed as wrong.
But let’s instead look at the extreme margins of Christianity. Does anyone claim that those responsible for The Crusades were not Christian? Not that I know of.
And let’s look at the extremists in modern Christianity. There are some people who will claim that the Westboro Baptist Church is not Christian but I think they are a minority. They don’t physically harm anyone, so let’s look at the people who advocate killing abortionists or homosexuals and especially those who actually do this.
I think those people are indeed Christians. I think despite a minority of people complaining otherwise, a majority of people would say they are Christians.
But is this really anything other than politically-motivated Semantic bullshit?
Obama has made it very clear that he is against ISIS. How does him not using the phrase “radical Islam” (or whatever else he is supposedly supposed to say) matter when he killed 20,000 of them?
This whole “debate” is just a way to demonize the entire religion. When George Tiller was murdered at his church for performing late-term abortions, some people may have said that those people who killed him weren’t Christians and guess what! Some who supported his death were fine killing him in a church because they didn’t feel that he (or his church for that matter) were very Christian.
Regardless, most people were content with saying both sides were Christian and they somehow managed to make this determination without feeling the need to monitor the Episcopalian church down the street or demand that Christian refugees not enter America because they know the fucking difference.
So sure, they’re Islamic. And it doesn’t fucking matter, leave that mosque down the street out of it.
I would be very surprised if as many as half of all fundamentalists have ever actually read the texts. Or can read at all, for that matter.