N.J. Muslim leaders condemn ISIS attacks in Paris

“These people are not Muslim”, says Wafi Abdouss, a young Internet personality from Morocco in a recent Youtube video.

Fundamentalism is the enemy because it doesn’t value life and how it only views the world as being with them or against them. “And I just wanted to extend my deepest condolences to the French people”. Ibrahim condemned what happened in Paris. In OR, anti-Muslim protesters held a rally outside the Portland Rizwan Mosque, one of them with a shirt that said, “Proud to be an infidel. We also know that most terrorists today are Muslims”. He’s a physician from Chicago who blogs at BeliefNet.

The first narrative is nothing short of an appeal that aims to foster the simple understanding that it is not religion that is responsible for crime but people, and it is unfair to generalize a whole religion based on the acts of a few misled, disillusioned freaks.

On the other hand, we have the so-called moderate Muslims who mumble feeble protestations that “this is not Islam”. It still is to me.

What they did in Palmyra they hope to do to the Parthenon; the crucifixions they carry out in the lands they control they dream of doing in ours and everywhere else in the world. That’s a little like excommunication in the Catholic tradition.

But worse than willful ignorance is outright denial, specifically, the claim that these terrorists are not really Muslims and that this is not really Islam, which is the position firmly embraced by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. No you can not do that. “War starts in the minds of people”, Yacoubi said.

In my longest piece on the topic, I discuss ISIS theology from the perspective of Islamic theology, and show that ISIS fundamentally contradicts Islam, Muslim opinion, the intent of Islamic law, and the mechanisms by which Muslims reach religious conclusions.

“If you don’t like this country, why the f*** did you come?” Will Christians and Jews condemn the Beirut and Baghdad attacks? Shortly after learning of the attacks in the French capital that left at least 129 people dead, Martin Alan Schnitzler left a message late Friday with the Islamic Society of Pinellas County, according to the criminal complaint against him.

To let terrorists appropriate the word Islam into their name (the Islamic State) is to give them a significant victory over one of the world’s great religions.

But Afifi stopped short of accusing ISIS of apostasy. Hamid is the author of Temptations of Power, a book about Islamist movements in the Middle East. They disparage Muslims and drive a wedge into American society, which, more than any other nation, is built on the contributions of its minorities and immigrants. That is their legal and theological reasoning.

The French government and Muslim leaders are aware that a similar reaction to Friday’s bloodshed is distinctly possible.

Condemning the actions of ISIS from an Islamic perspective begins with scripture.

“Allah says in the Quran: “Whoever saves a life it is as if he has saved the life of the whole humanity”.

Cole added: “Mainstream Muslims are outraged at allegations that the gratuitous brutality and grandstanding bloodthirstiness of ISIL can be traced to their ‘church'”.

Politics comes to play in all this, of course, says Mohammed Fadel of the University of Toronto.

Of course we don’t believe all Muslims or even the majority are violent, but the overwhelming percentage of terrorist acts around the globe are being committed by people who claim the mantle of that religion, and ISIS undoubtedly does.

“The Sunni states in the region are either unwilling or incompetent or unable to intervene to stop ISIS”.

For its part, ISIS seems to take this stuff seriously too. It’s towns of Muslims that ISIS conquers, rapes and massacres.

Showing solidarity with Muslims, and distinguishing them from extremists, led Brazilian Caio Leonardo to introduce a new hashtag: NotInMyNameEither. Given their false theology, it makes very little sense to call ISIS Islamic.