President Barack Obama may have argued after the Orlando shootings that it is not a military strategy to say the words "radical Islam," but the fact is, he has not had a military strategy for fighting ISIS for three years, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said Wednesday.
"ISIS is not on the run, it is on the rise in Sinai, Egypt, growing in Tunisia, Libya, making some gains in Iraq and Syria," the Texas Republican lawmaker said on
Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program.
It has taken Obama three years to get to the point where he is now on ISIS, McCaul continued, while insisting that "you have to define the enemy to defeat it."
"[Winston Churchill didn't dance around the Nazis, he called it fascism," said McCaul. "President [Ronald] Reagan and [John F.] Kennedy called it communism and they defeated communism. Now we have a generational threat, a struggle called Islamist extremism. We need to define it to defeat it."
Meanwhile, McCaul also commented on Homeland Security Secretary's Jeh Johnson's statements from Tuesday, when he told
CBS News that "sensible gun control" laws are a "matter of homeland security."
"Nobody wants terrorists to get weapons, but their weapon of choice is the AK-47," said McCaul, noting that 100 million of them have been sold. [Omar] Mateen was not on a watchlist at the time he purchased the weapons, so it is a red herring. The federal courts have held that the weapon is protected by the Second Amendment. We have to do this in conformity with due process in our Constitution and Jeh would agree."
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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