ISIS answers Francis in an episode of ideological warfare

Islamic State Answers Pope Francis: Ours Is a Religious War and We Hate You

Pope says Islam is not terrorism

In deference to the undoubted reality that most Muslims and most Muslim regimes oppose terrorism and Jihad - of which they are themselves the most frequent and numerous victims - , as well as to the exigencies of war propaganda and the domestic politics of the West, the pope has denied the existence of religiously incited violence, the exceptional fertility of Islam in producing it, and the extent of Muslim support for it.

Liberals have done the same, but also taken it upon themselves to deny Islamic theological legitimacy to ISIS, Jihaders, or Muslim terrorists, their religious views as well as their deeds, much as religious liberals deny the theological validity of Christian condemnations of homosexuality and that the Bible enjoins its violent suppression - though other liberals, of course, oppose Christianity and the authority of the Bible because both condemn homosexuality and the latter enjoins its violent suppression.

Liberals for centuries have adopted as a strategy in their culture wars simply muddying the waters as much as possible, sowing confusion through widespread lying that the religions opposed to them are actually themselves liberal, rightly understood, thus giving ideological cover to subversion by infiltration and ideological conquest from within.

ISIS has responded to all of that with a vigorous and clear assertion of the Islamic legitimacy of their ideology and that terrorism and Jihad are inspired and even demanded by genuine, legitimate, historic, theologically correct, and valid Islam.

That, of course, is exactly the preferred line of Breitbart and the Trumpists.

That it is perfectly true alters nothing.