At roughly 1 a.m. pacific standard time Tuesday morning, suicide bombers who the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS) claims were working for them detonated belt-fastened explosives in the Brussels airport in Belgium, killing at least 34 and injuring nearly two hundred others. The response to this from leading Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is about what you would expect; he insisted that the problems caused by the Islamic State and similar organizations are rooted in Islamic theology and culture, advocating for the United States to allow for more extreme methods of torture to be used on suspected terrorists and doubling down on his previous vow to implement a temporary ban of Muslims from entering the United States . Students at San Luis Obispo High School generally disagree with this approach to terrorism. “[ISIS] believes that they’re representing Islam but any of their victims or captives would certainly say they do not follow the rules of Islam,” said junior Bishal Shukla.

This kind of angry distrust toward Islam is nothing new in the United States, although no major political figure has ever employed this level of hateful rhetoric – not even after the attacks of September 11. Is there any validity at all to this insistence that there is inherent evil within Islam? The answer is more complicated than we would like. There are 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, making Islam the second largest religion on Earth second only to Christianity. Among the many Muslims worldwide, trends towards extremism and violent dogmatism vary significantly between different Muslim-majority nations. Sharia Law, an Islamic law that contains tenants demanding that apostates from Islam be killed simply for abandoning their faith or that adulterers be stoned to death, is believed to be the direct, uninterpretable word of God and ought to be the law of the land by the majority of Muslims in countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. Extremist groups like ISIS claim that their mission is to establish a world Islamic state ruled under that same Sharia law.

With many Muslims in many Islamic theocracies believing that Sharia law is the uninterpretable word of God just like ISIS does, it would be disingenuous of me to say that the terrorism committed by such organizations has no root in Islam at all. It’s important to remember, however, that even with Muslims with radical views so prevalent in the populations of so many countries, many hundreds of millions of moderates who respect people’s personal freedoms and rights to believe what they want still make up the majority of the religion. Islamic countries such as the United Arab Emirates or Tunisia are peaceful and are some of the Western world’s best partners in trade and foreign policy. It should also be considered that while groups like ISIS and demagogic theocracies like Afghanistan may use their religion to justify the cruelty of their actions, many of their members’ motivations are just as rooted in politics and a hatred of the seemingly never-ending presence of Western militaries throughout the Middle-east.

Is ISIS an Islamic organization, and do they share beliefs felt by a significant number of Muslims around the world? Yes, unfortunately they do. Are they representative of the Islamic faith as a whole, and any peaceful Muslim should be treated the same way as a terrorist? Absolutely not, and the hatemongering used by people like Donald Trump is disgusting and displays a blatant misunderstanding of the reality of the situation. Conflating peaceful practice of Islam with terrorism is the worst way to approach organizations like ISIS, and relying on generalizations to escape nuance only ever ends badly.