If President Obama had canceled his scheduled trip with his family to a baseball game in Cuba with Raul Castro, the terrorists would be winning.
That’s the message Obama sent to critics of the optics of the American president sitting with the Cuban dictator after radical Islamic terrorists had attacked Brussels, killing at least 30 people.
During an interview with ESPN, one of the hosts at the game asked Obama why he could sit and enjoy the game after a devastating attack.
“It’s always a challenge when you have a terrorist attack anywhere in the world, particularly of this age of 24/7 news coverage. You want to be respectful and understand the gravity of the situation, but the whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives.
Obama compared his decision to the Boston Red Sox’s decision to play a game shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, to show a united front to the world.
“That is the kind of resilience and the kind of strength that we have to continually show in the face of these terrorists,” he said.
He argued that the only weapon that terrorists had was fear.
“They cannot defeat America. They don’t produce anything. They don’t have a message that appeals to the vast majority of Muslims or the vast majority of people around the world,” he said. “But what they can do is scare and make people afraid and disrupt our daily lives and divide us, and as long as we don’t allow that to happen, we’re going to be OK.”
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