Wait, what? What was the Islamic State (ISIS) doing with an Islamic prayer book and a manual of Islamic law? Don’t they know that they have nothing to do with Islam? If you believe the establishment media and law enforcement/intelligence establishment, you’d expect ISIS to be reading Robert Spencer books. And our moral superiors years ago assured us that ISIS had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Islam. Barack Obama made it clear: “ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” Former British Prime Minister David Cameron intoned: “What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry said: “It’s not a state. There’s nothing legitimate about it. There’s nothing Islamic about it. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s their title and we shouldn’t use it and I feel that very strongly.”
Obama State Department spokesperson Marie Harf emphasized that Obama meant what he said: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion. The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.” Former British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared: “[ISIL]’s so-called caliphate has no moral legitimacy; it is a regime of torture, arbitrary punishment and murder that goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” The British opposition agreed: then-Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that Islamic State “extremists are beheading people and parading their heads on spikes, subjugating women and girls, killing Muslims, Christians and anyone who gets in their way. This is no liberation movement — only a perverted, oppressive ideology that bears no relation to Islam.”
Only the Islamic State itself seems not to have gotten the message, and the group continues to recruit among peaceful Muslims by presenting itself as the embodiment of authentic Islam.
“Remnants of Isis: finds in a Syrian village – in pictures,” by Delil Souleiman, Guardian, March 25, 2020:
A year after the last black flag of Islamic State was lowered in the Syrian village of Baghouz, traces of the jihadist group are still all around this small and remote village near the Iraqi border, where Kurdish fighters and the US-led coalition declared the defeat of Isis in March 2019…