Part of a cult of death.
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President Obama on Sunday addressed the nation about the steps government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: keeping the American people safe.
The address was the just the third Oval Office address in Obama’s presidency, and comes three weeks after a terrorist attack in Paris killed 130 people and four days after husband-and-wife shooters – apparently inspired by a similar ideology – killed 14 at a California holiday party.
“This is outrageous from someone who wants to assume the highest office”, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said at a Capitol Hill news conference, adding that Trump’s newly stated position is “un-American”.
Obama admits that ISIS “can’t defeat us on the battlefield”, but he refuses to bring that fight to them because it wouldn’t produce a “more sustainable victory”. The president acknowledged that the incident was an act of terrorism that appeared to be motivated by the Islamic State.
“At the same time, the broader American community has a responsibility to make clear that we’re gonna work with Muslim Americans to protect our country and to protect those in their community that are at risk of being radicalised”, the presidential spokesman said. “That too is what groups like what ISIL wants”. Moreover, the vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are Muslim. Obama spoke to this sense of alienation, pointing out that “defeating terrorism” requires enlisting “Muslim communities” as “our strongest allies, rather than push them away through suspicion and hate”. Such a path would only make the problem of confronting the Islamic State harder….
His direct appeals were aimed at circumventing Republicans who have been cranking up the rhetoric about Muslims, weak immigration laws and terrorist threats in a feverish presidential election campaign. “Because when we travel down that road, we lose”. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.
Obama told a peak viewing audience that “the terrorist threat has evolved into a new phase” but argued that his strategy was equipped to deal with this.
“So basically my message to them is we need to wake up as Muslims”.
“The point that we’ve made here is that the president believes strongly in good encryption and strong encryption, that that is important to protecting our civil liberties. And by drawing upon every aspect of American power”. Gun rights advocates oppose the no-fly list proposal because they say it violates the rights of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Opinions are that the president does not need to ask for Congress to authorize the use of force, he just needs to take action. Research by Pew and the Council on American-Islamic Relations has shown that the rise in apprehension about Islam in the USA has coincided with the emergence and success of the IS.
But the president’s critics said there was nothing new in his speech, except maybe his tying in gun control. House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed the president’s address as “a half-hearted attempt to defend and distract from a failing policy”.
The center has been working with local and federal law enforcement and created think tanks and nonprofit organizations dedicated to counter-radicalization, he said. In the case of ISIS, both the president and Congress are reluctant to declare war on ISIS because it would be seen as legitimatizing the group as a state.
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Republican McCarthy, though, questioned whether Congress writing its own authorization would change the president’s direction.
