That's about as true as saying that the followers of Mao Tse-tung were not Maoists.
Actually, at the beginning they weren't. They knew nothing of Mao's writings and his regurgitated Marxism and Hegelian dialectics. It was Mao and his educated cronies who conceived and refined their ideology. It was only later, in the early sixties,that Mao made all Chinese learn by heart his "Little Red Book", the comic book version of Maoist-style communism.
But it ought to be obvious that to have said Mao and his troops weren't communists because the troops couldn't quote Marx, is complete nonsense.
Similarly it's nonsense to say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam even if many of the foot soldiers can't quote the Koran. We get the ideology of their movement from what their leadership says.
And for ISIS that's best set out in their glossy magazine "Dabiq". And that is very much mainstream Islam. Very learnedly so.
See, for example, Sam Harris' reading of a lead article from "Dabiq" in his recent podcast.
Shame in all these apologists for ISIS. Either they're monstrously ignorant or dreadfully duplicitous. Knaves or Fools.
Sam on ISIS in their disturbingly professional glossy magazine Dabiq: What to Jihadists really want?
