Victor Davis Hanson offers a clear-eyed assessment of Islam that our government seems incapable of achieving:

We see this again in the administration’s fashionable collective denial that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam - as if foreign tourists visited Mecca as freely as they do the Vatican; as if Muslim apostates picked and chose their new religions as easily and safely as do Protestants; as if beheadings and stonings were as frequent in Paris and Houston as they are in Riyadh and Teheran; as if Bibles were brought into Iran and Saudi Arabia as freely as Korans are into America; as if churches sprouted up in Turkey, Iran, and Gaza as do mosques in Britain and Michigan; and as if women and gays were as equal in the Middle East as they are in the West. Islam is not just different from the West, but different in a manner that means its own extreme versions manifest themselves in predictable ways.

Along similar lines, Dennis Prager takes on President Obama's claim that ISIS behavior is "not Islamic."

The fact is that a study of Islamic history could not lead any fair-minded individual to conclude that all these Muslims and Islamic groups are “not Islamic.” Neither Islamic history, which, from its origins, offered vast numbers of people a choice between Islam and death, nor Islam as reflected in its greatest works would lead one to draw that conclusion.

Killing “unbelievers” has been part of — of course, not all of — Islam since its inception. Within ten years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.