After declaring that the attack on San Bernardino was an act of terrorism, President Obama said, “We will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us”. “We must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies rather than push them away with suspicion and hate”, he said.
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He laid the blame on people he said had “embraced a perverted interpretation of Islam”.
The president’s remarks came four days after a husband and wife stormed into a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, spraying the room with bullets from their semiautomatic weapons in a rampage that left 14 dead and 21 wounded. Obama added that terrorists’ methods have evolved since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
“This was an act of terrorism”, said President Obama.
The president urged Muslim communities to be vigilant and report radicalization of their peers, but also called upon all Americans to avoid demonizing Islam and its followers.
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. Such random killings in the USA are not uncommon.
Obama, elected on an anti-war platform, showed little sign of meeting his political foes in the middle as he reiterated calls for gun control and ruled out a ground intervention. He also asked Congress to authorize US armed forces to wage war against the ISIS group. “For over a year I have ordered our military to take thousands of air strikes against military targets”.
“I believe that the leadership of the congress would like to move ahead and there are some in the congress who come not really wanting to move ahead”, Lugar said.
The president again called for legislation that would prevent anyone on the terror watch list from purchasing a gun, but he did not announce anything new in his strategy against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon”, the President talked about.
“This is a matter of national security”, the President said in his address. Obama said. While law enforcement cannot identify every possible terrorist, he said, “What we can do and must do is make it harder for them to kill”.
“They account for a tiny fraction of a more than a billion Muslims around the world, including millions of patriotic Muslim-Americans who reject their hateful ideology”, he said. Johnson said the new alert system will better inform the public about threats to the United States, but he did not provide specific details. “We have to remember that”.
Republicans have become increasingly critical of the president’s handling of Daesh, or ISIS, arguing that his foreign policy has failed to address the risk from the militant group. And I will shut down the broken immigration system that is letting jihadists into our country.
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The objective of his address was to reassure American citizens that while terrorism is most definitely a threat, it is not insurmountable.
