Arab World Unites in Anger After Burning of Jordanian Pilot

There was one feeling that many of the Middle East’s fractious clerics, competing ethnic groups and warring sects could agree on Wednesday: a shared sense of revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest excess, its video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive inside a cage.

In Syria, the government denounced the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on something, the barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh.

Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s thousand-year-old Al Azhar institute and a leading Sunni scholar, was so angered that he called for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”

In a way that the beheadings of hostages had not, the immolation of Lieutenant Kasasbeh united the Arab world in an explosion of anger and disgust at the extremists, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh,” derived from the extremists’ Arabic acronym.

More From The New York Times: