President Obama said:  “ISIL is not Islamic.” Of all the absurd things he’s said, this must be the most absurd.

ISIL stands for “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. It is the same organization as ISIS: “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”,  and IS, “the Islamic State”.

These are excerpts from an article by David Solway at PJMedia:

Thirteen years after 9/11, after some 24,000 terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims since that fateful date, after the atrocities carried out and still being carried out by Caliphate-aspiring terrorist militias, after civil wars, incursions, the mass extermination and eviction of Christian populations in Muslim lands and territories, hostage-takings, kidnappings, beheadings, bombings, missile barrages — after all this, many Westerners still appear to endorse a strict distinction between Islam and Islamism. The former, we believe or have been led to believe, is a “religion of peace” whose doctrines have been twisted and misinterpreted by a cadre of extremists. Islam, according to this perspective, cannot be held accountable for a band of criminals willfully violating the tenets and premises of a venerable Abrahamic faith.

The claim is unsustainable. Where it is not advanced disingenuously — for profit, power or position — it is plainly a function of culpable or lazy ignorance or, at best, of a desire to be (or to seem) tolerant and supremely civil. I suspect that the majority of such Western apologists have not cracked a single page of the Koran or perused even a scattering of the ahadith and sirah, where the chasm on which they insist between Islam and Islamism is nowhere to be found. The Koran, in particular, brims with exhortations to violence against unbelievers, which the 1400-year imperial history of Islam has honored to the letter. The religious mandate as well as the empirical practice are undeniably Islamic, not “Islamist” — a concept that has no meaning in the theological literature.

Far too many of us cannot bring ourselves to understand that the enemy we are facing is not some fringe minority of “radicals” who are abusing not only their victims but the principles of the faith they proclaim. For one thing, the jihadists and their enablers may be a “minority,” but they number in the millions … A not unreasonable estimate of 10% gives 150-160 million. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of people determined to kill you. When one considers that this number amounts to half the population of the United States out for one’s blood, it puts the issue into perspective.

For another thing, the shahids and mujahidin know perfectly well how to read their sacred texts, far better than their victims, dupes, extenuators and fellow-travelers who neglect to study either the scriptures or the history of Islam in order to gain a more acute and comprehensive knowledge of the enemy who plots their destruction. Others, of course, have been bought, suborned by donations or bribes and subsidized by petrodollars, or they are trimmers who have capitalized on business interests and opportunities. …

Cruelty, oppression, the call to perpetual warfare …  are actually integral to Islam, bred in the unabrogated scriptures which permit, approve and ratify such depravities as slavery, child marriage, polygamy, gynophobia, deception (taqiyya), the breaking of treaties, the doctrinally sanctioned acquisition of booty and of women as the spoils of war, dhimmitude and, most terrible of all, wanton slaughter of unbelievers. As Koran 8:39 commands, “Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.”

It is not difficult, then, to see that ancestral Islam is demonstrably contemporary Islam since the Koran is understood to be an eternal book, coterminous with Allah, and thus does not allow for revision.

Further, critics of Islam who wish to spare the individual communicant, commendable as their attempt at fair-mindedness may be, are caught in a contradiction. In separating the institution of the faith, which they denounce, from peaceable and decent individual Muslims, whom they profess to applaud … they succeed only in undermining their own argument. Who or what can a “good” or moderate Muslim possibly be if he or she has no connection with or relation to the institution — the structure, practice, canons and prescripts — of the very faith from which he or she is said to be divorced? There is a blatant conundrum of identity at work here, which our charitable detractors apparently refuse to countenance or explain. Can there be such a chimera as a “Muslim” absent the institution of Islam? What is left but an empty jalabiya?

Muslims must be equally conflicted. Raheel Raza, whose film Honour Diaries decries some of the worst practices of her co-religionists, remains a pious Muslim who is comforted and nourished by her faith. What, we may ask, defines that merciful and solacing faith for her if it is based on the Koran, the ahadith, the sirah, the shariah and the diverse schools of a grim and stringent jurisprudence governing every detail of quotidian life? And if it is not predicated on authoritative Islam, what can possibly be left over from so aliquant a commitment except a few abrogated tropes and a number of rituals and customs? Perhaps it is a private faith she is espousing, but a private faith is not a religion and does not merit a historical name. …

What is the true core of Islam? …  The larger, Medinan portion of the Koran consists to an alarming extent of messages that would make any harbi (non-Muslim living in a country not subject to Islam) or apostate fear for his safety, freedom and very existence. …

We can no longer temporize and procrastinate. … The fact is, radical Islam is Islam, whose war against the West is transacted through the twin instruments of violence and infiltration, the latter a generally unacknowledged but even more effective form of terrorism. Merely remark the ruined neighborhoods, boroughs and suburbs of towns and cities in both Europe and America where Muslim immigration and mosque construction have gone unhindered.

Standard Islam is a war machine, an invading army with multiple techniques and weapons at its disposal.… Terror, however we define it, is a genuine expression of Islam.

“Islamism” is a figment of weak or frightened, naive or complicit minds …

Countering the pabulum of American presidential farceurs Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (and the equally mealy-mouthed claptrap of British PM David Cameron) that the conduct of Muslim terrorists is “not Islamic,” Daniel Pipes …  avers that “anyone with eyes and ears realizes that ISIS, like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic.” Nota bene: Islamic, not Islamist.

A former Muslim who goes by the pseudonym of Brother Rachid is even more emphatic: the terrorist franchises are marching in lockstep with the Prophet, their every abomination sanctioned by a command in the Koran, a passage in the ahadith, and an example in the sirah. They live in a veritable reverie of slaughter and conquest and thus fulfill what they conceive as a pledge and a duty. They are attending to the text. And in so doing, they also march in lockstep with their covert accomplices, namely, the asylum seekers, the refugee streams, the vast number of residential immigrants, the “re-united” families (often consisting of multiple wives masquerading as relatives and eligible for welfare), the firebrand imams and dawah-spouting [proselytizing] preachers, the second-generation, born-again jihadists, and the pitiable revisionists who strive to re-interpret and redeem what is constitutively resistant to their efforts, yet cannot extricate themselves from the snare of creedal affirmation. There is much truth to Burckhardt’s observation that “obedience to a non-Islamic dispensation could never be enforced.”

Perhaps Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said it best: “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” “Islamism” is a Fata Morgana, a conceptual mirage that beckons in a mental desert.

Erdogan’s slogan merits repeating, its content worth absorbing. Islam is Islam and that’s it.

Here is “Brother Rachid” addressing President Obama, to inform him emphatically that IS/ISIS/ISIL is Islamic.