You can’t reason or negotiate with ISIS.  They have no rational plan or foreign policy.  They kill, maim, enslave at random – from Yazidis to Christians to Muslims.  They are pathological, nihilistic killers with no ideology or religion – much less Islam, which, as President Obama has rightfully asserted, upholds the basic principles of justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.

These rituals remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.

Or so Janet Daily, in a lead article for the Telegraph, "The West is at War with a Death Cult," would have us believe – as would our dear learned foreign policy architects Kerry, Clinton, and Obama.  The mantra “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam” is repeated with dronelike mindlessness at every opportunity.  None of them can even say “Islamic terrorists.”  That would be insulting the Prophet of the religion of peace.  And as Obama has said, “[t]he future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”

By contrast, in a lead article in the Atlantic in March this year, titled “What ISIS Really Wants,” Graeme Wood, an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and contributing editor at the Atlantic, argued with thorough documentation and great detail and clarity that:

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

The article, of course, created a furor from the likes of the Huffington Post but was supported by the Brookings Institution and to a degree even by Politico and strongly supported by articles in the Middle East Forum.  One recent article reveals the absolute disconnect by the “un-Islamic” zombies from the reality on the ground.  The article deals with the recent Paris attacks and forcibly and succinctly debunks the comical absurdity of the cherished narrative that Islam is the religion of peace, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.  An earlier article along the same line is also a gem and contains comments by ISIS soldiers on ground regarding the claim that they are un-Islamic.  They are more than somewhat bemused.  As one of them smirkingly says, “Do they think we are Jewish now?”