King says describing Muslims as extremists, moderates ‘completely wrong’

AMMAN — Daesh terror group works by intimidations, “always trying to intimidate, scare, put fear into people’s hearts”, His Majesty King Abdullah has said in an interview on “Fareed Zakaria’s GPS” on CNN.

“They’re trying to invent falsely a linkage to a Caliphate, linked to our history in Islam, which has no truth or bearing to our history. To bring in ... young men and women that think that this is sort of an Islamic nation and it has nothing with our history,” the King told Zakaria in the interview, which will be broadcast on CNN on Sunday.

“The barbarity of the way they executed our brave hero I think shocked the Muslim world and specifically Jordanians and people from this region, that it had nothing to do with Islam,” His Majesty added in an interview promo released by CNN on Saturday.

In response to a question on how the West should deal with Daesh and whether the response should be essentially led by Muslims, King Abdullah said: “This has to be unified. I mean, I’ve said this to leaders, both in the Islamic and Arab world and to the world in general, this is a Third World War by other means, this brings Muslims, Christians, other religions together in this generational fight that all of us have to be in this together.”

He added that there is a short term part of this war, “which is the military part of the issue, there is the medium part, which is the security element of it, and then there’s a long term element of this, which is obviously the ideological one”.

When asked by Zakaria on his opinion of US President Barak Obama’s decision not to call groups like Daesh Islamic extremists “because he doesn't want to give them the mantle of legitimacy by acknowledging that they're Islamic”, the King said he thinks Obama is right.

“I think this is something that has to be understood on a much larger platform, because they're looking for legitimacy that they don't have inside of Islam. When we're asked in this debate, you know, are you a moderate or extremist — what these people want is to be called extremist. I mean, they take that as a badge of honour.”

Elaborating further, His Majesty said the term being used more often to describe such groups is the Arabic word Khawarij.

“These are in a way outlaws that are on the fringe of Islam, and if you look at sort of the way that they are actually represented inside of our religion, they are, these are sort of takfiris, and takfiris inside of ... Islam.

“If ... Islam is 1.5 billion Muslims, they represent only 1 per cent. Out of that, maybe 200 to 500 thousand of these people are actually takfiri jihadists … So to label Islam under the term of extremists and moderates is actually completely wrong,” the King stressed.

“I don't know what these people are, but they definitely do not have any relationship to our faith. When Baghdadi ... came out with his manifesto, even extremist organisations completely backed away from what he said. So he has nothing to do with the tenets of Islam, which is a religion of tolerance that reaches out to other people.”