Every single person I have ever talked with who has been forced to live under sharia law, despises it. The facts are clear, totalitarianism no matter how it’s dressed up is an assault on the human spirit, it’s evil…
ISIS SPOKESMAN: ‘WHAT’S OUR CRIME? WE JUST WANTED TO APPLY SHARIA.’
And what could possibly be wrong with that?
In a new video, an Islamic State (ISIS) spokesman named Abu Abd al-Azeem, “whose speech,” noted Reuters, “is peppered with Koranic recitations,” complained about the bad rap his cuddly group has gotten. “Why are we bombed by planes,” he asked plaintively, “why do all the nations of the unbelieving world come together to fight us?…What is our guilt? What is our crime? We (just) wanted to apply the sharia of Allah.”
Indeed. And now, in light of that statement, here are some questions that mainstream counterterror analysts should ponder deeply: did the Islamic State actually apply Sharia? ISIS is routinely dismissed as un-Islamic, but what exactly did they do that cannot be backed up by specific citations from the Qur’an and Hadith? And if the Islamic State just wanted to apply Sharia, and Sharia is entirely benign and compatible with Western values, as Western analysts also regularly insist, then why did the whole world regard the Islamic State as a criminal entity that must be destroyed? Why was it not welcomed into the family of nations, alongside other Sharia regimes including Saudi Arabia and Iran?
The cognitive dissonance arises, of course, from the assurances we received from the likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, David Cameron, and virtually every other authority in the Western world that the Islamic State was not Islamic, and indeed, had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.
This reached absurd levels during the Obama administration. “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion,” said Obama’s Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf in August 2014. “The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.” Yet Abu Abd al-Azeem’s words above make it abundantly clear, as does every other statement ever issued by ISIS, that the group believes itself to be operating in the name of Islam, and indeed, to embody the fullness of Islamic teaching. In June 2014, a video circulated of a masked Islamic State commander telling a cheering crowd: “By Allah, we embarked on our Jihad only to support the religion of Allah….Allah willing, we will establish a state ruled by the Quran and the Sunna….All of you honorable Muslims are the soldiers of the Muslim State.” He promised that the Islamic State would establish “the Sharia of Allah, the Quran, and the Sunna” as the crowed repeatedly responded with screams of “Allahu akbar.”
