Yes, ISIL is a terror-based insurgent army that seeks to establish a Caliphate, but the group's actual end goal is far from political: ISIL believes that, through jihad, it will bring about the Day of Judgment. This is not true Islam.
Interpretation
ISIL's motives are rooted in extremist beliefs rather than political objectives, misrepresenting true Islam.
Malcolm Nance's quote emphasizes that while ISIL, as a terror-based insurgent group, claims to pursue political goals through jihad, their true aspiration is to trigger what they perceive as an apocalyptic reckoning. Nance distinguishes their violent interpretations from the core tenets of Islam, firmly stating that their actions misrepresent the religion they claim to uphold.
In practice
In a discussion about terrorism at a university, this quote could be used to differentiate between extremist views and mainstream beliefs.
I come from an African-American family that is predominantly Muslim. I have had to covertly operate in parts of the Middle East and Africa. I've lived a Muslim life and prayed in Mosques, Husseiniyahs, and shrines where needed. One must respect Islam to understand Islam. I've read the Quran through and through a half dozen times.
Waterboarding should never be used as an interrogation tool. It is beneath our values.
I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.
I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a 'stress demonstrator' to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.
So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.
Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.
Because of the great differences in our ways of thinking, it is inevitable that we have different religions and faiths. Each has its own beauty. And it is much better that we live together on the basis of mutual respect and mutual admiration.
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