For President Obama to assert that ISIL is not Islamic is a lot like saying “The Mafia Isn’t Italian.”
Of COURSE the Mafia is Italian. The vast majority of Italians and Italian-Americans aren’t part of it and have no ties to it, but the Mafia is Italian nonetheless, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise to spare the feelings of honest Italians.
In the same way, ISIL is most defintely Islamic. Most Muslims aren’t part of it, most Muslims have no ties to it, and none of the decent Muslim Americans I know would want any part of it. But none of that matters. ISIL’s members are all Muslims and all believe they’re following the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.
Hey, I’d like to pretend that “Torquemada wasn’t Catholic” or that “Bugsy Moran wasn’t Irish” or that “Richard Nixon wasn’t a Republican.” But nobody can wish unpleasant realities away.
This is essentially the “No true Scotsman” fallacy. If you point out a counterexample of someone who doesn’t act in a stereotypical Scottish manner, you find an excuse to deny that he was even Scottish to begin with.
If a guy proclaims to be a devout Catholic and starts shooting up a bar, can he still claim to be a devout Catholic? He can try, but he’s demonstrated that he is not adhering to the faith to which he claims. The ISIS crowd can claim to be Muslims, but they definitely aren’t following the faith. If you claim to follow a religion but refuse to adhere to its principles, are you still one of the faithful? In my opinion, no.
This is more like saying the Mafia is not Catholic. It doesn’t make any more sense that way, but it’s a common type of rhetoric. Republicans call their wayward kin RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). The intent is to disassociate people from their religion (or political party if you can draw a distinction there).
Though I understand and appreciate the sentiment, which (more accurately) should be ‘ISIS is Islamic, but is using a twisted interpretation of Islam that decent Muslims shun and abhor, and which is in no way representative of Muslims as a group’.
Obama seems the only one I know who doesn’t know what the last letter is. It isn’t surprising that he doesn’t know what the first letter is.
I realize he is trying to distance the rest of Islam from the crazies, but it is an overstatement that makes him sound stupid. Of course it’s Islamic, just like Zionism is Jewish. It’s not the whole thing, but it is certainly part of it.
Obama got away with this kind of doublethink when he said the coup in Egypt wasn’t a coup so they could continue to get aid, and when he said the tax in Obamacare wasn’t a tax. He had to got into court and admit he lied about the tax, but no one is going to do that with ISIS or ISIL or NotreallyISIL or whatever he wants to call it.
I dunno, I’ve seen plenty of folks opining that e.g. the Phelps crew wasn’t really Christian - which usually has the atheist crowd saying “yes they are” and the Christian crowd insisting that “no they ain’t” or at least “don’t speak for all Christians”.
So it can really go two ways - either self-identifying as X means you are X regardless of any other factor; or “being X” predicates a certain type of behaviour or set of values in which case it’s absolutely [del]kosher[/del]halal to reject and deny people who claim X but don’t front it.
And considering a majority of Muslims, including pretty hardcore folks, condemn ISIL at least in small part because they’re not exactly observing the Pillars, it’s not particularly out there to claim they’re No True Muslims.
That’s the trouble when religious groups don’t have a central authority like the papists :). *They *get to excommunicate fools (and conversely you can use their not excommunicating fools as a bludgeon without any qualm). But anybody can say “I’m a Muslim”. At which point does it stop having any meaning ?
Also, not to hijack or anything, but “The Mafia is Italian” is not correct, is it ? You mention Bugs Moran, I’ll raise you a Bugsy Siegel. Dutch Shultz was a German immigrant. And so on. There were plenty of non-Italians involved in the golden age of gangsters.
The charitable reading would be that it’s more like him saying the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea isn’t democratic.
However, I would agree it’s a stretch to say that ISIS isn’t Islamic. Their spin on Islam relies on an unbelievably evil and perverse cherrypicking of all its most reactionary elements, and most of them are probably internet porn-addicted hypocrites and religiously illiterate, but I don’t see how they don’t qualify as “Islamic.”
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and claims to be setting up a fundamentalist state in the name of duckdom it’s a duck. No getting around that.
You’re joking, right? Even Rush Limbaugh would shake his head at this comment.
If someone says Phelps and Co. aren’t Christian, I disagree. If someone says they don’t speak for Christians and don’t do what Jesus taught, I agree. If Obama is saying ISIS is not mainstream Islam and doesn’t represent sane Muslims, I agree. Saying they aren’t Islamic is dumb.
No, quite serious. Maybe I wasn’t clear - when Obama said that the tax associated with Obamacare was not a tax, he was lying. This became clear when he admitted in court that it was a tax.
Perhaps better to phrase it “it became obvious that he was lying” rather than “he admitted it”. To my knowledge he has not addressed this, nor apologized.
I, for one, have never argued that Fred Phelps (or Torquemada or whatever horrible Christian you care to name) was not a Christian.
I think he was a wretchedly BAD Christian, but he was definitely following what he believed were the teachings of Jesus and of the Bible as a whole. I can denounce him (and I have), and I can state emphatically that he doesn’t speak for me (and he didn’t), but what I CAN’T do is deny that he was a Christian. And Obama can’t deny that a particular reading of Islam is what drives ISIL.