There is no such thing as a holy war, and we are not in one.
We are in a war with terrorists. We are not in so-called holy war with the religion of Islam. In fact, to repeat that malarkey is to play directly into the hands of terrorist spin-masters who use the hysteria to recruit martyrs willing to kill and die for something they are wrongly told is high-minded.
This is not to belittle the seriousness or the evil of ISIS and its malicious, despicable beheadings, burnings and mass murders. And certainly some -- maybe most -- of the fighters in the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham believe they are answering a medieval religious call to fight and kill infidels -- and even to bring on the end of the world.
But to equate or label Islam -- the world's second largest religion -- as terrorist is like saying all Catholics and Christians are terrorists because Eric Rudolph killed two and injured scores more with bombings at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and a Birmingham abortion clinic.
The holy-war hue and cry of the moment comes especially from conservative news shows and pundits, who assert that the "Bible" of Islam -- the Koran -- intones that killing unbelievers is required.
Consider some of the things that our Bible in Deuteronomy 21 tells us -- even about believers: "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother ... Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city ... . And they shall say unto the elders of his city: This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you. ..."
Some might say, "But we've evolved ... They haven't."
Who is "they?" All 1.6 billion Muslims whose religion is Islam? "They" -- the second largest religion at 23 percent of the global population and right behind Christians who number 2.2 billion, or 32 percent of people worldwide -- mostly get up every morning and go about their lives just as we do, striving to take care of their families and be the best people they can be.
Sadly, "they," like us and members of every other world religion, have an occasional Eric Rudolph and others like him who simply aren't as well known.
Religion is not an excuse to kill people, nor is it an excuse to hate.
Shortly after Eric Rudolph decided to plead guilty "to deprive the government of its goal of sentencing me to death," he wrote out a statement with this nice religious heading: "Psalm 144:1 Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight:"
He went on then to explain that while he believed abortion is murder, mostly he was mad at the government -- "[T]he agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly."
For what it's worth, Christian religious groups roiled with protestations when The New York Times in 2003 called Rudolph a "Christian terrorist." The phrase soon was dropped from the newspaper's online version.
We should all react with our heads and hearts: ISIS really isn't about religion though its military and strategic leaders, as master manipulators of social media, clearly want to use the battering club and pulpit of religion as a shield, excuse, battle cry and recruitment tool. These monstrous extremists are quite efficient at marketing and branding: Even the murder club's name -- Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham -- is meant to carry the symbolism of religion. Kind of like the Ku Klux Klan's use of a burning cross.
But, quite frankly, every time we jump to the bait and label this "holy" as in a "holy war," (Is anything holy about any war?) we give these merchants of terror a robe of righteousness. We do the terrorist chiefs' spin work for them.
Let's not.
ISIS -- no matter what is in their name or what they spout on camera -- is a terrorist organization. Not a church. And not a religion. Quite simply, our war needs not to be with a religion or with Muslims. It needs to be with this gang of murderers whose leaders, like Mussolini and his trains, have kept torture running on time.
For God's sake, don't give "them" credit for anything more than that.