It would be refreshing if Kerry would open his well-thumbed Qur’an and explain to us exactly how the Islamic State has “hijacked” Islam. One wonders also why religion hijackers seem so exclusively drawn to Islam, as there are no notable attempts to hijack Christianity or Judaism.
“Kerry brands ISIS ‘apostates,'” Agence France Presse, February 2, 2016:
ROME: With an unusual choice of language, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry waded into Islamic theological debate on Tuesday when he branded ISIS “apostates.”
The United States affords its citizens religious freedom and does not consider apostasy a crime, but Kerry chose the term to rubbish the jihadis’ claims of piety.
“Daesh is in fact nothing more than a mixture of killers, of kidnappers, of criminals, of thugs, of adventurers, of smugglers and thieves,” he declared.
“And they are also above all apostates, people who have hijacked a great religion and lie about its real meaning and lie about its purpose and deceive people in order to fight for their purposes.”
Some Muslim legal scholars consider the proper punishment for turning one’s back on the faith to be death and several majority Islamic countries execute convicted apostates….
