Obama Won’t Call Terror Fight a War on Radical Islam
Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,”
President Barack Obama “rejected the notion” that the war on terrorism
is any kind of “religious war” against radical Islam.
Obama said, “I think that the way to
understand this is, there is an element growing out of Muslim
communities, in certain parts of the world, that have perverted the
religion, have embraced an annihilistic, violent, almost medieval
interpretation of Islam.
And they’re doing damage in a lot of countries
around the world. But it is absolutely true that I reject a notion that
somehow that creates a religious war, because the overwhelming majority
of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even
recognize it as being Islam. And I think that for us to be successful in
fighting this scourge is very important for us to align ourselves with
the 99.9% of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking
for — order, peace, prosperity, and so I don’t quibble with labels. I
think we all recognize that this is a particular problem that has roots
in Muslim communities, but I think we do ourselves a disservice in this
fight if we are not taking into account the fact that the overwhelming
majority of Muslims reject this ideology.”
The president continued, “What I do insist on is that we maintain a
proper perspective and that we do not provide a victory to these
terrorist networks by over-inflating their importance and suggesting in
some fashion that they are an existential threat to the United States or
the world order. The truth of the matter is, they can do harm, but we
have the capacity to control how we respond in ways that do not undercut
what’s the essence of who we are. That means that we don’t torture, for
example, and thereby undermine our values and credibility around the
world. It means that we don’t approach this with a strategy of sending
out occupying armies and playing whack-a-mole wherever a terrorist group
appears, because that drains our economic strength and it puts enormous
burdens on our military. What’s required is a surgical, precise
response to a very specific problem. And if we do that effectively, then
ultimately these terrorist organizations will be defeated because they
don’t have a vision that appeals to ordinary people. It really is, as it
has been described in some cases, a death cult or an entirely backward
looking fantasy that can’t function in the world.”
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