President Barack Obama went primetime with the conversation about terrorism Sunday night.
Advertisement
In Iraq and Syria, airstrikes are taking out ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers and infrastructure, the president said, and since the November 13 Paris attacks, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have ramped up their contributions to the coalition military campaign.
He said the United States would draw upon “every aspect of American power” to combat IS.
Obama said the country is also training tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian forces who are fighting ISIS on the ground and that the USA will be deploying Special Operations forces in Syria. 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.
“At the same time, the broader American community has a responsibility to make clear that we’re gonna work with Muslim Americans to protect our country and to protect those in their community that are at risk of being radicalised”, the presidential spokesman said.
Trump also noted the president would not say, “We are at war with radical Islamic terrorists”.
President Obama in his presidential speech from Oval office condemned the attack in California and said that the act was an act of terrorism.
The president called on Muslims to confront interpretations of Islam that lead to violence. He concluded the segment by touting how Obama “has long relied on speeches and ignored short-term analysis to play what we always talk about here at the White House as President Obama’s long game, whether it’s rhetoric or strategy to defeat ISIS”. “Moreover, the vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are Muslim”, Obama had said. “So, this was an act of terrorism created to kill innocent people”. Instead, it was meant to inform Americans of the administration’s efforts against Islamic State and to urge people not to give in to fear or language that casts suspicion on all Muslims and mosques.
“To some degree, that is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself”, Obama said at a news conference in Antalya, Turkey, after the G20 summit.
“We will prevail by being strong and smart”, he told the nation. It is this type of attack that we saw at Fort Hood in 2009; in Chattanooga earlier this year; and now in San Bernardino. Others are lambasting Obama for trying to make the fight against terrorism a gun control issue.
Unlike other presidents, Mr Obama has been rare in addressing Americans from the Oval Office.
Obama once again asked Congress to take on common-sense reforms to keep guns out of the hands of risky people, including barring people on the government’s no-fly list from acquiring weapons. The president needs to propose a serious plan with actual goals, which I don’t think we’ve really seen out of him yet, and then we need to be authorizing.
Advertisement
One Republican candidate, Senator Marco Rubio, responded to Mr Obama’s address by saying that nothing in it “will assuage people’s fears”.
