“We don’t want terrorists to have a safe haven in cyberspace”, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference a day after U.S. President Barack Obama made a similar appeal. If it can not, does that make us more vulnerable to attack? On the other hand, we have a very small terrorist threat to the “homeland” against which, for the most part, that establishment’s efforts are irrelevant because the attackers are home-grown, self-radicalised lone wolves.
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He’s also sticking with his strategy: continuing airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that officials claim have killed 23,000 Islamic State fighters; building up forces of Iraqis and Syrians and deploying more special forces to train and help them; and pursuing diplomacy to end the Syrian civil war.
“Pledging to destroy Islamic State, US President Barack Obama has called on Muslim leaders at home and around the world to speak out against the terrorist organisation and its ‘hateful” ideology.
“We can not turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam”. However, the topic will come back under discussion following the San Bernadino attacks last week, the White House said.
Obama is right to caution against the risk of further alienating Muslims in the United States and around the world.
“They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield… but they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops and draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits”.
Magid said attacks in Paris and California have taken a toll on his community in Sterling, Virginia. He’s calling for Congress to prohibit people suspected of terrorism or on the no-fly list from buying guns.
Obama is caught between, Brand says, “to sound the alarm but not sound alarmist”.
Obama has urged stricter gun laws following the California shootings, but like previous mass shootings, those calls have met resistance from gun control opponents. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said the U.S. faces a real threat from radical Islamic terrorism. He says Americans can not give into fear.
Still, Obama did begin to acknowledge that there did appear to be some link between their connection with Islamic radicals and their actions, saying, “It is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West”. “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”.
Ahmed says the Muslim community is continuing the conversation about their faith so people can understand that they are not the enemy. They are thugs and killers.
(By some counts, there have been more than 350 mass shootings in the United States already this year, but he only does the big ones.) But this time, Obama spoke from the Oval Office.
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Obama is scheduled to speak to the nation at 8 p.m. EST. That followed other attacks by so-called lone wolves at Fort Hood in 2009, Texas, and at the Boston Marathon in 2013. The avalanche of Republican criticism that continued Monday focused on the president’s tone, his word choice and the fine points of his plans – not in most cases the specific policy prescriptions he presented in his address from the Oval Office Sunday night. But Obama’s staff arranged a podium in the Oval Office where Obama will stand, with his desk and the American flag behind him.
