American Muslims view

Thu Aug 21, 2014 at 04:30 PM PDT

Forward this next time right-wingers lie about prominent Muslims not condemning ISIS violence

by Ian Reifowitz

attribution: Unknown

Muslims never condemn jihadi terrorism, right? Wrong.

Among many other lies, the right wing loves to claim that Muslims don't speak out against violence committed by jihadi terrorists like ISIS. Laura Ingraham recently pulled this shtick: "And it would be nice if more in the Muslim world coming out and condemning what the Islamic State is doing. You're not hearing enough of those voices, if any. I mean, where are those people?" Why do right-wingers do this? Because it allows them to perpetrate the fiction that all Muslims are terrorists, that they are all our enemy. That kind of thinking leads directly to Fox News' Andrea Tantaros recent comments, where, after discussing "the history of Islam," she declared that we should put "a bullet to the head" of "these people." There's no difference between ISIS and Islam, in that mindset.
Slight problem. The right-wingers are wrong. Even before Ingraham's rant, top Muslim religious leaders from around the world had already condemned ISIS' brutal treatment of Christians and other religious groups. And at home, there was this statement about ISIS from our country's largest Muslim civil rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

American Muslims view the actions of ISIS as un-Islamic and morally repugnant. No religion condones the murder of civilians, the beheading of religious scholars or the desecration of houses of worship. We condemn the actions of ISIS and reject its assertion that all Muslims are required to pay allegiance to its leader.

After the vicious beheading by ISIS of American journalist James Foley, the Muslim Council of Britain, the biggest Muslim organization in that country, denounced it:

Not in our Name: British Muslims Condemn the Barbarity of ISIS We are horrified at the abhorrent murder of James Foley, a reporter who initially went to the region to expose the human rights abuses of the Syrian regime. ISIS has murdered this man for no reason at all....ISIS does not speak for Islam.

Let's be clear, violence committed in the name of religion, racial superiority, ideology, or any other form of hatred is evil. Smearing a whole group because of the actions of some who claim membership may not be as evil, but that's an awfully low bar to clear. I hope Laura Ingraham is proud of herself.