'Hey ISIS, you suck!' says Muslim group on Chicago billboard
An American Muslim group expressed their public disavowal of the Islamic State terrorist group through a billboard hoisted on a highway in Chicago for everyone to see.
The nonprofit group Sound Vision Foundation obviously wanted the world to know that Muslims condemn the terrorist organization and that it is not representative of the Islamic faith when it displayed its message on an I-294 billboard.
"Hey ISIS, you suck!!!" read the billboard message signed, "From: #ActualMuslims."
It also quoted Quran 5:32 that says, "Life is sacred."
The group's representative, Leena Suleiman, said that 60 Muslim-American professionals in Chicago who wanted to express their sentiment against the terrorist attacks funded the billboard message.
"It's about shouting out, 'ISIS does not represent me, I'm Muslim, I say the word 'sucks,' I'm like everyone else in my country,'" Suleiman told NBC Chicago and added, "We want to scream it from a billboard."
She also said that their message is also for non-Muslims or "people who need to hear that Muslims are not OK with what ISIS is doing" since the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) terrorist group declared its war against all apostates in the name of Allah.
Suleiman added that many Muslims identified with the "ISIS sucks" campaign because that's how they truly felt.
"When they see these attacks, they don't identify with the attacks, they identify with the victims," she said.
Dr. Nabeel Qureshi, a Christian speaker with a Muslim background and considered as one of the leading experts on Islam, referred to the Quran 5:32 verse as "the most ripped-out-of-context verse of the Qur'an in the West."
The author of "Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward" argued that many use the said verse to portray Islam as a peaceful religion but that doing so also entails ignoring the remaining parts of the verse.
"In fact, it says almost the exact opposite: that Muslims can kill those who are their enemies!" Qureshi wrote on the blog Answering Muslims.
