Obama began his address by remembering the fourteen lives that were taken during the attack. Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes – and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. None of it marked a shift in strategy, but instead an effort to reassure the American public.
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SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama had kept a relatively low profile in the days immediately following the San Bernardino shooting. He said the Federal Bureau of Investigation has no evidence that the killers were directed by terrorist organizations overseas or were part of a broader conspiracy.
OBAMA: They’d stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition and pipe bombs.
And Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said at a Brookings Institution talk Sunday that the tech industry should “shut off [ISIS terrorists’] means of communicating”, and “we need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS”. “Our military will continue to hunt down terrorists in any country necessary”. They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield.
“On December 7, 1941, in response to Pearl Harbor, FDR did not give a partisan speech – rather, he called on Americans to unite and ‘win through to absolute victory, ‘” Cruz said in a statement Sunday night, referring to President Franklin Roosevelt. Specifically, he called on Congress to prohibit people on the no-fly list from buying guns.
Islamic Society of North America spokesman Edgar Hopida agrees American Muslims must denounce the messages of groups like the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
The president implored Americans to not turn against Muslims at home, saying the Islamic State was driven by a desire to spark a war between the West and Islam. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL. “ISIL does not speak for Islam”, he said.
More important, the speech reflected Obama’s seemingly unhurried approach to the battle against Islamic State since the group roared out of the Syrian desert in 2014: cautious, incremental, and only now escalating to meet the growing scope of the threat.
“It is the responsibility of all Americans – of every faith – to reject discrimination”.
“The strategy we are using now-airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country. It is our responsibility to reject language that encourages suspicion or hate”, he added.
In other tweets, Trump excused Obama for reading a prepared speech off of a teleprompter, but said he hoped Obama wouldn’t criticize Second Amendment gun rights. But in August 2010, he used the Oval Office as his backdrop to discuss the end of USA combat operations in Iraq. This is the most direct admission by the US President that the shooting in California that killed as many as 14 people was not a simple criminal act, but a terrorist act indeed.
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First, he said, the nation must avoid “a long and costly ground war”.
