Is ISIS Faithful to Islam? by Patrick Buchanan

From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“We are not at war with Islam,” said John Kasich after the Brussels massacre, “We’re at war with radical Islam.”

Kasich’s point raises a question: Does the Islamic faith in any way sanction or condone what those suicide bombers did?

For surely the brothers and their accomplice who ignited the bombs in the airport and set off the explosion on the subway did not do so believing they were blasting themselves to hell for all eternity.

One has to assume they hoped to be martyrs to their faith if they slaughtered infidels to terrify and expel such as these from the Islamic world and advance the coming of the caliphate of which the Prophet preached.

And where might they have gotten such ideas?

Kasich’s word, radical, comes from the Latin “radix,” or root.

And if one returns to the roots of Islam, to the Quran, does one find condemnation of what the brothers did — or justification?

Andrew McCarthy was the prosecutor of the “Blind Sheikh” whose terrorist cell tried to bring down a World Trade Center tower in 1993, and plotted bombings in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.

The U.S. government depicted the sheikh as a wanton killer who distorted the teachings of his faith.

Yet, McCarthy discovered that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was no imposter-imam, but “a globally renowned scholar — a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium.”

Seeking to expose the sheikh as a fraud who had led his gullible followers into terrorism, against the tenets of their faith, McCarthy discovered that “Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.”

“When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up. When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.”

To continue reading: Is ISIS Faithful to Islam?