Western leaders insist that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Evidence to the contrary appeared again this week from Mohamad Jamal Khweis, an ISIS recruit from the United States who
said in a 2016 interview with Kurdistan24, "Our daily life was basically prayer, eating and learning about the religion for about eight hours." Khweis was sentenced to 20 years in prison on October 27 for providing material support to ISIS, according to CBS News.
As early as 2001, immediately after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush gave a
speech in which he claimed that in the United States, the terrorist acts in which over 3,000 people were killed "violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith" and that "Islam is peace".
Twelve years and many spectacular terrorist attacks later, in 2013, when two jihadists murdered Lee Rigby in broad daylight in London, the prime minister at the time, David Cameron,
declared that the attack was "a betrayal of Islam... there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act".
In January 2015, jihadists in Paris shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked
Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, murdering 15 people. French President François Hollande
said that the jihadists had "nothing to do with the Muslim faith".
Two years later, when a jihadist targeted the very heart of European democratic civilization, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, British PM Theresa May
said: "It is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism and the perversion of a great faith".
Comment: Al Azhar sounds pretty un-Islamic if all you are taught there is one version of it; the kind that encourages terrorism. From
this article:
According to the most recent data released by the Egyptian government, there were 297,000 students studying at al-Azhar University in 2013 and 2014. In 2015, there were 39,000 foreign students studying at al-Azhar. These students are taught the theological legitimacy of cannibalizing infidels, gruesome ways to torture non-Muslims to death, and the importance of raping and humiliating non-Muslim women. This explains why numerous Egyptian public figures and intellectuals have called for a terrorism investigation of al-Azhar University. For example, Egyptian historian, Sayyid Al-Qemany, called upon the Egyptian government to designate al-Azhar University as terrorist organization.
[...]
Al-Azhar was also responsible for the imprisonment of another very popular Muslim scholar, Sheikh Mohammed Abdallah Nasr, for adopting a non-theocratic modern interpretation of Islam, landing him an unprecedented 13-year prison sentence for blasphemy with hard labor. Incredibly, one of the formal charges in al-Azhar's court case against Mr. Nasr, is that he criticized Khalid ibn el-Waleed (585 -642), a Muslim warrior and sacred Sunni figure for being a rapist and a cannibal. During a televised debate with radical al-Azhar University scholars, Mr. Nasr scrutinized el-Waleed, for decapitating a Muslim poet, Malik ibn Nuwayrah, cooking his head and eating from it, before raping Nuwayrah's wife. Mr. Nasr's criticism of the Muslim warrior and cannibal was among the official reasons for his conviction. Speaking to al-Azhar scholars Mr. Nasr said, "you wonder where terrorism is coming from? It's from your religious heritage."
As to the final question:
How much longer can the West afford to ignore reality?
When it comes to IS being Islamic, the West isn't really ignoring it -
Western governments and their intel agencies created it. The West is capitalizing on the fact that Islamic State has taken Islamic theology to the extreme and enabling them, by their
support of these groups, to
terrorize Western and Middle Eastern populations and destabilize the ME region.
See also:
Just how Islamic is 'Islamic State'?
Beyond Islamophobia: The Truth About Salafism and Jihadism
The difference between Islam and clericalism in the Greater Middle East
Comment: Mexico is paying the price of years of condoning corrupt practices that have allowed crime to flourish to insane extremes. What future is there for a country when its population is faced with such horrors?
The original article contains pictures of the remains of the victims. Be warned, they are graphic and disturbing.