During a rare Oval Office address Sunday evening, President Obama sought not to offer any new proposals or prescriptions to address terrorist threats, but, rather, to reassure Americans – including, perhaps, a number of Democratic lawmakers who have been bucking the administration’s line – that he takes these threats seriously.
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Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all took to the bully pulpit from the office to address the nation during times of national uneasiness. While that seems sensible, the recent attacks in California and Paris should not be used as a pretext to mandate a weakening in encryption technology developed for routine telecommunications.
“We’ve seen that the screening process to-date is inadequate to meet the threat that we find ourselves under today”, Pompeo said. “It’s not some of the political posturing that we’re talking about with the refugees-the ability of someone with a French or Belgian passport to come to America without additional screening – if that individual has been to a war zone – we need to correct that”.
Yet Obama’s speech was likely to leave his critics unsatisfied. Marco Rubio said the president “said nothing new”.
“I know that after so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure”, he said, speaking from a lectern in his West Wing office.
“Unfortunately the American people did not hear of a strategy or a plan to defeat and destroy” Islamic State, McConnell said.
Since then, 16 months of air strikes have been stepped up in Iraq and Syria, and the U.S. is sending a permanent “expeditionary force” of special forces to fight Islamic State independently of local fighters.
Even Congressman Bill Pascrell, who has been a strong Obama supporter, questioned some of the policy that led to the current crisis.
Sunday night, he again made absolutely clear he will not order a ground war in Iraq or Syria and send “a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil”. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.
Still, it hasn’t been an easy two weeks for the Muslim community, so Hayee is urging that while emotions are running high, a peaceful response is what is needed.
The president´s pledge and extremists´ praise followed an announcement by the FBI that it was treating the investigation into the San Bernardino rampage as an act of terrorism. No longer are terrorists seeking to commit multifaceted attacks, such as 9/11, but they have “turned to less complicated acts of violence”, such as the San Bernardino shootings.
Also, as part of his combat against terrorism campaign, Obama promises to strengthen gun control laws, which he says will make it harder for those trying to harm Americans to have access to weapons. But it may be remembered by historians as the date the 44th U.S. President tried to allay the growing fears of a nation and talk tough against terror.
Muslim Community Center board members say they think the President had wise words in his speech.
He will likely be proved right.
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Obama is caught between, Brand says, “to sound the alarm but not sound alarmist”. Skepticism of Islam has also been fueled, in part, by suggestions from some GOP presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, who has agreed with the idea of creating a database to register Muslims in the U.S.
