Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says the White House’s refusal to characterize the war on terror as a war against radical Islam will make it “very hard” to win.
The White House has declined to use the terminology employed by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said Saturday, “It is a war against terrorism and radical Islam, against everything aimed at breaking solidarity, liberty and fraternity.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest referred to terrorists as “violent extremists who have sought to incite a religious war against Islam.”
“The world and the United States, as we’ve discussed before in the context of ISIL, is at war with these individuals, these violent extremists who carry out these acts of terror and try to justify it by invoking this religion,” Earnest said.
Graham stressed on Fox that “we are in a religious war with radical Islamists, who have embraced a religious doctrine that requires them, compelled by God, to purify their religion, to kill all moderate Muslims or people who don’t agree with them within the faith, to destroy every other religion.”
“And here are our choices. We can fight them over there or we can fight them at home. We can fight them by ourselves or we can fight them with partners. I choose to fight them over there with partners. And when our president doesn’t acknowledge that this is a religious-driven war, it’s going to be very hard to win it,” the senator said.
Graham added that “there is a doctrine embraced by radical Islamist that requires them to kill or convert.”
“Most Muslims do not feel compelled by God to kill people of other religions. But this radical strain of Islam is compelling them to kill us because we don’t embrace their view of religion,” he continued. “It has nothing to do with our support for Israel. It has nothing to do regarding our foreign policy. This has been going on for a couple of decades now. And until our president understands what the Egyptian president understands, that we’re in a religious war, it’s going to be very hard to defeat it.”
“It has nothing to do with our intervention in Iraq, like a Democratic United States Senator suggested that the people in Paris were radicalized because our invasion of Iraq. People who think that are missing the big picture here.”
That was Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) who drew that conclusion.
“It is important just to recognize that the individuals who carried out these attacks in Paris were originally radicalized not by ISIS but in coordination against the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq,” Murphy told MSNBC.
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