Obama promises US military will overcome ‘real threat’ of terrorism
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UNITED States President Barack Obama, in a rare primetime speech designed to reassure a jittery nation, vowed on Sunday that America will destroy the Islamic State group and hunt down its followers at home or abroad.
Facing questions about his leadership and strategy, Obama harnessed the highest trappings of US power to calm a country put on edge by a rampage in California that killed 14 people.
“After so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure,” Obama said in a solemn address from the Oval Office, adding that the San Bernardino massacre was evidence of an “evolving” and increasingly homegrown threat.
As a father of two daughters, Obama said, he could imagine himself or his kin in San Bernardino or Paris.
“Here’s what I want you to know. The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any organization that tries to harm us,” he said.
“Our military will continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country where it is necessary.”
Obama urged Muslims in the US and around the world to “decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al-Qaida promote.”
He detailed a multi-pronged strategy that will rely as much on community action, high-tech and countering propaganda as military force.
It is just the third time Obama has delivered an Oval Office address. A senior administration official said the speech was designed to convey the seriousness with which Obama was taking the shootings in San Bernardino, which are being investigated as a terror attack.
On Wednesday, a young married Muslim couple dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with her grandmother, donned tactical gear and opened fire on an office party full of the husband’s co-workers.
Obama said the pair “had gone down the dark path of radicalization.”
“They had stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition, and pipe bombs. So this was an act of terrorism.”
However, he added that there was “no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas or that they were part of a broader conspiracy.”
Both shooters died in a hail of police bullets a few hours later, leaving questions about how, when and why they may have become radicalized.
The Islamic State group has praised the attackers, US-born Syed Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik, as “soldiers” of its self-proclaimed caliphate, while stopping short of claiming outright credit.
In an interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa, Farook’s father suggested his son approved of the group’s ideas and was fixated with Israel.
Woven throughout Obama’s address was a plea for unity.
“We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,” he said.
“ISIL does not speak for Islam. They are thugs and killers ... If we’re to succeed in defeating terrorism, we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies rather than push them away through suspicion and hate,” he said.
He also pressed America’s feuding political factions to rally together. After two decades battling jihadism, Americans appear increasingly divided on the nature of the problem and how to respond.
In a CNN/ORC poll, 68 percent of Americans said the US military response to the Islamic State group has not been aggressive enough. Conducted before the shootings, it also found that 60 percent disapprove of Obama’s handling of terrorism.
Republicans have demanded that Obama back a full-scale deployment of NATO ground forces to Syria.
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