Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says the American people “cannot give into fear” in the aftermath of attacks in Paris and California.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks about her counterterrorism strategy during a speech at the University of Minnesota.
The married couple who shot 14 people to death in the San Bernardino rampage earlier this month have been described by authorities as self-radicalized.
Clinton’s address marked the third speech on the Islamic State and terrorism she has given in less than a month and is a signal that she’s already shifting into general election mode as she focuses on issues that more independents and Republicans care about than Democrats. “And we will defeat these new enemies just as we have defeated those who have threatened us in the past, because it is not enough to contain ISIS – we must defeat ISIS”, Clinton said. “We can not let fear push us into reckless actions that end up making us less safe”, Clinton said. Tom, thank you and we hope you’ll join Martha Raddatz and me as we moderate the New Hampshire Democratic debate this Saturday night, December 19th, 8:00 p.m., 7:00 central.
Clinton’s plan listed goals of defeating the terrorists by “foiling plots” and other means but failed to explain how she would go about doing so. At that time, she said of the technology firms, “We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS”, using an acronym for Islamic State.
Clinton decried anti-Islam sentiments, saying, “We can not lend credence to the phrase, ‘War on Islam'”. This is not a clash of civilizations.
Mrs. Clinton pressed for shutting down the Islamic State’s recruitment efforts online, thus preventing foreign fighters from coming into the US, through better data-sharing efforts with European allies. I’m not sure which of her proposals were new and which she has outlined before. She said that the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack underscored the urgency, and that the randomness of the California shooting, carried out at a nondescript office park, “made us all feel it could have been anywhere, and anytime”. “Companies should double their efforts to maintain and enforce their own service agreements and other necessary policies to police their networks, identify extremist content and remove it”.
Sanders points out at every campaign stop in the Granite State that he, unlike Clinton, did not vote to invade Iraq which he said created the current environment of political instability that has nurtured ISIS.
But Clinton, about whom former Vice President Walter Mondale joked “you may have heard of her” in introducing her Tuesday, is so well known she needs a policy edge. She also called for an expansion of the target for airstrikes in Syria.
Clinton said Muslim-Americans are key to stopping terrorist recruitment. “They are the most likely to recognize the insidious effects of radicalization before it’s too late, intervene to help set a young person straight”.
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“George W. Bush was right”, Clinton said a statement that briefly silenced the university audience recalling the president’s visit to a mosque in Washington days after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and his rejection of the concept that the West and the Muslim world were headed to a clash of civilisations.
