In an address to the nation Sunday night in the wake of last week’s deadly San Bernardino attacks that the FBI is investigating as terrorism, President Obama called on tech companies for help.
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The podium is set in the Oval Office for President Barack Obama’s address on terrorism and the threat posed by the Islamic State group. He once derisively dismissed the group as a terrorist junior varsity team, said before the Paris attacks that it was contained in Syria and Iraq, and as recently as last week said there weren’t credible known threats against the U.S.
Obama said, “We cannot turn against one another”, but he also said radicalism has spread into some Muslim communities and has become a problem that Muslim leaders “must confront without excuse”. “If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away through suspicion and hate”. Authorities say USborn Syed Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik dropped off their six-month-old daughter with her grandmother, donned tactical gear and burst into an office party full of Farook’s co-workers, spraying them with bullets.
Obama repeated his long-standing opposition to an American-led ground war in the Middle East and made no mention of the more aggressive action others have suggested, including enforcing a no-fly zone and safe corridors in Syria.
Obama urged Muslims in America and around the world to “decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like Daesh and Al Qaeda promote”.
“What the president believes here, incredibly, is that somehow, people who are radicalized domestically as terrorists by radical Muslims, are going to somehow follow his gun control laws”.
Sunday night’s address was only the third time the Oval Office has been used by President Obama – a point hardly lost on historian and author H.W. Brands, senior chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. “That we have always met challenges, whether war or depression, natural disasters or terrorist attacks, by coming together around our common ideals as one nation and one people”.
“What we can do, and must do, is make it harder for them to kill”, he said. They are thugs and killers. The Iraqi army the US trained for years and equipped at enormous cost turned out to be utterly unable to stand up to ISIL fighters. “If they seek to get a gun – or how about the pipe bombs that they were intending to use – there will be no restriction in place on paper that will stop them”.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki called the president’s response “pathetic”.
Yet the speech is likely to leave his critics unsatisfied. 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. “Part of a cult of death” he said, “they account for a tiny fraction of a more than a billion Muslims around the world”.
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. Trump said. “We need a new President – FAST!”
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Obama spoke four days after that deadly massacre – and 48 hours after the FBI first described the case as a terrorism investigation. “This is a matter of national security”.
