President Barack Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington.
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When the cameras blinked on for Sunday night’s address on the San Bernardino, California, shootings and the threat from the Islamic State, President Obama delivered it from the Oval Office, a place for speechmaking that he had largely shunned during his presidency. “Then a megalomaniac strongman steps forward, and he starts screaming about travel bans and deportation, and offering promises to keep all of us safe, which to some and I think actually to many more than those of us in this body seem to understand, to some will sound much better than not being protected at all”. Conservatives who insist on the term “Islamic terrorism” should at least be willing to recognize the value of hindering the weaponization of Islamic terrorism.
Even the optics of Obama’s speech were tone deaf. He announced no significant shift in strategy and offered no new policy prescriptions for defeating IS, underscoring both his confidence in his current approach and the lack of easy options for countering the extremist group.
Obama said what he always says about gun control – that it must be more regulated, that we are in danger, that semiautomatic weapons promote violence and killing. He also urged Congress to pass new force authorization for military actions underway against IS in Iraq and Syria, and also to approve legislation to bar guns from being sold to people on a no-fly list.
Even the expected puffery for more gun control laws was strangely muted. To define ourselves as more than a national security threat.
“It only works if there’s a partnership”, Rhodes said, “If there’s this divide created between Muslim Americans and everybody else, clearly that’s going to become more hard”. Obama has used the Oval Office as a backdrop, a favorite of past presidents, just three times since taking office seven years ago. “There are millions of patriotic Muslims in America right now that are upstanding members of their community, that are serving in the United States military, that are teachers, that are co-workers, that are neighbours, that are friends”, he said.
When terrorists are at war with us, we can not simply declare that war to be over, whenever it is politically convenient, as Obama did when he withdrew American troops from Iraq, against the advice of his own generals. Donald Trump has led the call for closer monitoring of Muslims and mosques here in the U.S.
The spread of radical Islam into American communities, he said, is “a real problem that Muslims most confront without excuse”.
Instead, Americans have been listening to those who want Mr. Obama’s job.
The meat of the president’s short speech involved ticking off what the United States is doing to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including cutting off its oil transports, dismantling its financial networks and bombing strategic targets. However, the group has set its sights elsewhere in the world, launching attacks in Lebanon and Turkey and downing a Russian Federation airliner over Egypt.
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Since the deadly November 13 attacks by Islamic State followers in Paris and last week’s California shootings, there has been a clear call from American officials for Muslims to help police themselves. One of the California attackers, Pakistani national Tashfeen Malik, used Facebook during the attack in which she and her husband killed 14 people to vow her allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A Facebook official said the post came about the time the couple stormed the San Bernardino social service center. “It certainly would advance ISIL’s narrative that somehow they were acting on behalf of Islam, when in fact, the ideology that they are seeking to advance is a gross perversion of that religion”, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference on Monday. It took the president four days to respond and finally admit what most Americans already knew – it was a terrorist attack.
