I’ not sure if you think you’re refuting me, but if you do, you’re wrong.
I am a Catholic who considers abortion an atrocity. I don’t know anyone who has ever tried to bomb an abortion clinic, but if I did, I’d report him to the police immediately.
If it turned out that a hypothetical Catholic named Francis Malone set a bomb outside a Planned Parenthood office, and said the Rosary while waiting for the bomb to go off… I would denounce him. I would support his imprisonment and maybe even his execution. I would condemn him as harshly as possible.
But I could NOT deny that he was a Catholic or that he was acting according to what he thought were Catholic principles. And I would not use weasel words like “He wasn’t a TRUE Catholic.” And if a Republican President tried to state in a speech that Malone wasn’t a Catholic, I’d laugh at him.
When the stakes are life and death, we can’t and shouldn’t lie to spare people’s feelings.
The Mafia IS an Italian group. Honest Italians have to deal with that.
Anti-abortion terrorists generally ARE Christians of some stripe. Non-violent Christians have to deal with that.
And ISIL are Muslim to the core. The millions of Muslims who AREN’T part of ISIL have to deal with that.
Among the meanings of “Islamic” is “consistent with the Islamic faith”–e.g., Islamic finance. If, as a Muslim, I start a bank that uses standard investments and interest payments and I call my bank the First Islamic Bank of America, it could be properly said that my bank is not actually Islamic. Indeed, my conduct could be labeled “un-Islamic.”
This is clearly the meaning Obama was using. ISIS isn’t Islamic means ISIS isn’t acting consistently with Islam. There’s nothing at all incorrect about that statement.
However, there isn’t general agreement as to where exactly the boundary of Islam and non-Islam is. Sure, the vast majority of both Muslims and non-Muslims would say that someone who worships belly-button lint and claims that the Qur’an is a book of lies is probably not a Muslim, but there’s a huge gray area where various sects of Islam are in disagreement. To make an analogy, many Christians claim that the LDS/Mormon church is non-Christian. However, they claim they are. Which of them is right? Am I worthy to judge?
Even if I concede that it is a gray area, so what? Obama is making an assertion that ISIS isn’t Islamic. I happen to agree, as do more than a billion Muslims.
But it isn’t really gray–certainly not as gray as whether Mormons are Christians. ISIS has been roundly and widely condemned by Islamic scholars and Muslims across the planet. By contrast, many non-Mormons consider Mormons to be Christians, as do most scholars of the subject.
The full quote, inconvenient though it may be for scoring points:
“ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state; it was formerly al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq and has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border. It is recognized by no government nor by the people it subjugates.”
“Not Islamic” means condoning the killing of innocents, which Islam in fact does not.
As to the question in the OP, I would have to agree with the majority. And I would go even further, because IMO Islam is whatever its followers think it is, not what some scholar of Islamic texts think it is, and there are enough current practitioners of Islam who buy the same interpretation of Islam as ISIS to make it (a form of) Islam by virtue of that fact alone. It’s not remotely analogous to the Phelpses, who have a version of Christianity which is apparently only shared by themselves alone. The Phelpses are more like a cult.
That said, I think you need to cut Obama some slack here. Besides trying to prevent discrimination against Muslims here, his big goal is to get as much support from the Islamic world for the battle against ISIS as possible. So he needs to say all sorts of BS of this sort so as to convince the worldwide Muslim community that this is not some sort of Christian versus Muslim battle, which could make them reluctant to support the battle.
In sum, you need to look at this as some sort of standard political jive which is not to be taken seriously, rather than as a serious statement that deserves to be analyzed this way and that.
I think the best (indeed almost exact) analogy is the Lord’s Resistance Army. Are they Christian? I don’t know- I am guessing most of them identify as such. Are they a Christian organization? Not in a meaningful way. Are their works accepted by other Christians as representing Christianity? Absolutely not. Is their theocratic vision something Christians want ?
No. It’s pretty obvious to everyone these guys are using Christianity as a thin veneer to lend legitimacy to their own nefarious purposes.
I don’t have a cite for specific numbers. I don’t know if such a cite exists.
But if you follow these matters, it’s accepted as a given that they, and other similar organizations like al-Qaeda, have broad support from many many people in many countries (including western countries) who provide funding and other support, and this accounts for the enormous difficulties involved in trying to defeat them.
I mean, if you insist on limiting the estimated number of supporters to people actually found guilty in a court of law of being part of them, go ahead. I don’t think there’s any rational basis for anything along those lines.
I don’t really agree with Richard, but it’s worth pointing out that even material support does not imply acceptance of ISIS/L as “Muslim”. There are any number of lapsed American Catholics who supported the IRA, for example. There may be Muslims who support ISIS or Al Qaeda because they believe the West shouldn’t meddle in the Middle East, but don’t subscribe to their religious views. Similarly, Iran opposed the Iraq invasion even though Saddam Hussein was essentially an apostate from a Shi’a perspective.
First, al-Qaeda isn’t ISIS. Al-Qaeda doesn’t believe in slaughtering Shia on sight, or killing Christian children for being Christians. Al-Qaeda doesn’t believe that a Muslim can simply declare himself the new Caliph. Etc. As insane and radical as Al-Qaeda is, ISIS is yet more insane. It is true that a tiny tiny but significant minority of Muslims support al-Qaeda. As far as I can tell, ISIS does not have even that kind of “wider” acceptance and you’re wrong to conflate them.
Second, Muslim support for an organization doesn’t render it Islamic. The support may or may not be religious. An individual might support a group’s politics or whatever but not agree that the group is behaving Islamically. More importantly, while the content of religious doctrine is subjective, it is not wholly unmoored from any evidence. Some opinions about what is required by Islam are more well-grounded than others, and the opinion that Islam forbids the conduct of ISIS is very well-grounded.
If a million Muslims believed that eating pork was permissible because it’s so tasty, would you tell me I’m incorrect to state that eating pork is forbidden by Islam?
I don’t think it’s comparable to the IRA or similar.
The IRA was not a religious organization. It was an organization of people who happened to share a given religion. Their goals were mostly not religious. Their idea was “we Catholics are being persecuted here and we need to fight that”. It wasn’t “we need to promote the Catholic religion by this fighting”.
ISIL and al-Qaeda et al are explicitly religious organizations, and their primary goal is to promote their version of Islam. It’s reasonable to assume that people who support these organizations buy into their interpretation of Islam, or something close to it. (There are doctrinal differences between various forms of Islam who share the general notion that killing infidels is a great idea, but these do not need to concern us here.)
To be sure, we know that the rise and fall of any particular interpretation of a religion can be driven by other factors, as is undoubtedly the case here. But it is what it is. Right now, this version of Islam clearly has a lot of support out there.
[I saw Richard’s post after the above was typed and refer to it below.]
See above. These are insignificant differences.
Even ISIL alone is thought to have about 30K actual fighters, which are undoubtedly only a small percentage of their supporters. But you need to include the other groups in as well.
Addressed above.
If these were practicing Muslims who interpreted Islam that way, of course.
Why is that reasonable? Do you share all the views of everyone you support? Does my support for Obama imply that I approve of drone strikes against civilian targets?
If Obama was primarily about drone strikes against civilians, similar to how ISIL is primarily about spreading their version of fundamentalist Islam, it would imply that. But Obama is about a whole lot of other things, so it doesn’t.
There could be people who support them but don’t agree with their version of Islam. FTM, there could also be a lot of Muslims who agree with ISIL’s interpretation of Islam who don’t actively support them for various reasons. But as a practical matter, the best proxy estimate for how many people support their version of Islam would be based on the number of people who support them.
ISIL is primarily about founding a state based on their version of fundamentalist Islam. They are a revolutionary group, not a missionary one.
Anyway, that’s like saying “the best way to measure the number of grains of sand on a beach is to roll around on one and weigh what sticks to you”. A useless statistic is not an improvement over no statistic.
IMO it’s reasonable to assume that a guy who supports an organization which is “primarily about founding a state based on their version of fundamentalist Islam” supports that version of fundamentalist Islam. YMMV.
Sure, decent Muslims cherry pick and rationalize that that command doesn’t mean what it appears to, especially when taking other verses into account. What I’ve heard many Muslims say is that is in regarding unbelievers that are attacking you. Other Muslims translate it to mean just what it seems to, especially when reading the second to last sentence in that verse. Instead of commanding to let them go on their way when they stop attacking, it says to leave them alone if they convert. This also fits with Muhammad’s actions of killing those who wouldn’t convert.
And I think you’re the one playing games with cherry-picked verses and the vast majority of Muslims are the ones doing reasonable interpretation. Who is right and who is wrong is beyond the scope of this thread. The point is that not all interpretations are equally valid. Thinking that it’s OK to kill Shia for being Shia is akin to thinking that eating pork is OK. You can make crazy arguments for either of them, but that doesn’t suffice to show that Obama is incorrect to call ISIS un-Islamic.
Presidents often say stupid things for political purposes. They all do it, and on a stupidness ranking of 0 to 10, I’d rate this a 1. Seriously, this is molehill that we don’t need a Mohammed to move.