Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Sunday, just hours after
shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando blasted the Obama administration as "willfully" avoiding telling Americans the threat of Islamic terrorism and ideology.
"If you look around the planet, from Yemen to Afghanistan, we're in a worldwide death struggle with a radical movement and they want to destroy western civilization and yet our leaders in both Europe and America blindly say they can't really mean it," Gingrich told Fox News'
"Fox News Sunday" program. "How many incidents does it take for them to realize they mean it? You better hope they don't get nuclear weapons."
The former speaker said he's not willing quite yet to "jump ahead to assert that this is terrorism related to Islamic supremacists despite the fact that they have released the name of the shooter," but still, attention needs to be paid to the fact there is a pattern of people connected by the Internet "who are potentially very, very dangerous."
Gingrich also said that he hopes, "tragically," that the "gay rights movement will come to realize that Islamic supremacy is their mortal enemy. People get killed in countries dominated by Sharia if they are gay. So I think in that sense, maybe this is the beginning of a new conversation about how serious of a threat Islamic supremacism is."
NBC News reported Sunday that the FBI is looking at something in the shooter's background that indicated "leanings" toward international terrorism.
"If the FBI knew that this guy was engaged with serious Islamic groups, we're going to have to redefine for the courts national security restrictions, and say if we know that you're in contact with people who actively want to kill Americans, we're going to lock you up," said Gingrich. "This is an alien ideology that wants to destroy our civilization and our current approach to it is incredibly incompetent."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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