We don’t believe it’s been contained in Syria and Iraq, where its influence was first felt, and we fear it hasn’t been contained in the USA, where its fingers seem menacingly to creep.
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The choice of the Oval Office as the location for the address to the nation was partly the result of holiday happenstance: The rest of the White House is decorated for the many parties that Obama will be hosting this week for his staff, members of Congress, journalists and others.
But he also pledged that Isil would be destroyed.
Ahmed says many people don’t realize ISIS is also targeting Muslims. What it does is have a meaning that can be interpreted that if you are a Muslim that you are a terrorist and you are radical.
The choice of a little-used location for his address underscored not only the public concern about further threats in the aftermath of the Paris and California attacks but also how Obama has struggled to convince people that his counterterrorism plan can be effective.
OBAMA: If we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources and using our presence to draw new recruits. At the same time, he pleaded with Americans to avoid targeting or denigrating Muslims. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want. “Well, here’s what I want you to know: the threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it”.
Obama said that the goal of ISIS was to provoke a battle between the United States and the Muslim world.
Home-grown extremists are hard to uncover and pose a challenge for intelligence officials, said James McJunkin, a former counter-terrorism agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Detection becomes the issue”. He called the shootings an “act of terrorism”, but said there was no evidence the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas or part of a broader network in the U.S.
“I think the President was quite direct about the role that those Muslim Americans can play in defeating ISIL, both in terms of the responsibility that the Muslim community has to stand up and speak out against those extremist voices inside their community”, he said.
“We must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than pushing them away through suspicion and hate”, Obama said.
There have been reports that the couple that killed the people in California had been acting under the orders of Islamic State.
President Barack Obama insisted Saturday that America “will not be terrorized” as the Daesh militants praised the perpetrators of the California mass shooting as “soldiers” of its caliphate.
One Republican candidate, Senator Marco Rubio, responded to Mr Obama’s address by saying that nothing in it “will assuage people’s fears”.
Earnest was referring specifically to Republican presidential candidates as he criticized Republicans and the president’s “political opponents” throughout much of Monday’s press briefing for widespread dissatisfaction with President Obama’s speech on Sunday night.
A new Authorization for the Use of Military Force should not be open-ended and must be written with greater specificity than the one that remains in effect, which Congress passed with the explicit objective of targeting the culprits of the September 11 attacks.
On Sunday, President Barack Obama spoke about a mass shooting in the United States for the 17th time in the past seven years.
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To understand just how tone-deaf Obama’s speech was, compare it with French President Francois Hollande’s. “We will destroy ISIL (another name for ISIS) and any other organisation that tries to harm us”.
