US President Barack Obama on Wednesday urged
Western and Muslim leaders to unite to defeat the
“false promises of extremism” and reject jihadists’
claims to represent Islam.
“The terrorists do not speak for a billion Muslims,”
Obama told delegates from 60 countries at a White
House summit on countering radicalism.
“They try to portray themselves as religious leaders,
holy warriors,” he said. “They are not religious
leaders, they are terrorists.”
In the wake of brutal jihadist attacks in Europe and
the Middle East, Obama said more must be done to
prevent groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda from
recruiting and radicalizing.
The battle, he said, was as much for hearts and
minds as one waged by the military on the ground
and in the air.
The “ideologies, the infrastructure of extremists, the
propagandists, the recruiters, the funders who
radicalize and recruit or incite people to violence,”
must be tackled, Obama said.
He challenged critics at home and moderate
governments abroad to undercut the jihadist
narrative that there is a “clash of civilizations”
between an anti-Muslim west and a radicalized
Middle East.
Domestically, Obama has been criticized for not
describing the attacks in Denmark, France, Syria
and Libya as the work of “Islamic radicals.”
He chose to face down the critics Wednesday saying
“we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with
people who have perverted Islam.”
- Action plan -Top US diplomat John Kerry, who on Thursday will
host a higher-level ministerial meeting aimed at
drawing up an action plan, called it “the defining
fight of our generation.”
And he poured cold water on the notion that the
thousands of foreign fighters flowing to the
battlefields were all motivated by religious feelings.
Two Britons, among about 4,000 Europeans who
have joined IS in Iraq and Syria, had first bought
copies of “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for
Dummies,” he scoffed.
But Kerry made it clear that “we’re here for a simple
transcendent reason, to safeguard the future for our
people,” saying groups like IS “want to drag us back
literally into dark ages… obliterate knowledge as
they destroy books and school rooms.”
Communities in the United States and abroad must
do their part, Obama said, stressing Al-Qaeda and IS
“deliberately target their propaganda in the hopes
of reaching and brainwashing young Muslims.”
They do so through “high-quality videos, the online
magazines, the use of social media, terrorists
Twitter accounts — it’s all designed to target today’s
young people online in cyberspace.”
The summit has been in the pipeline for months, but
took on greater significance after several attacks,
including on a cultural center and on a synagogue in
Copenhagen which left two people dead.
Among those attending is Anne Hidalgo, the mayor
of Paris, where attacks by Islamist gunmen last
month on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly
magazine and a kosher supermarket left 17 people
dead.
On Sunday, a video emerged apparently showing
Islamic State jihadists beheading 21 Egyptian
Christians in Libya.
Kerry said the challenge was to “coordinate almost
as never before.”
“The task before us is to combine the right partners,
the right planning, the right degree of political
commitment and over a sustained period of time we
will win,” the veteran diplomat insisted.
Sessions on Wednesday highlighted existing anti-
extremist programs in Boston, Minneapolis–Saint
Paul and greater Los Angeles, which involve
community policing and other tactics.
The US State Department announced the
appointment of a special counter-terrorism
communications coordinator, but it was unclear
what concrete outcomes there would be.
Obama meanwhile spoke emotionally about a
Valentine’s card he received from an 11-year-old
Muslim American called Sabrina.
“‘I am worried about people hating Muslims,'” she
wrote “‘please tell everyone that we are good
people, and we’re just like everyone else.'”
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