Green Party Nominee Jill Stein: ‘ISIS Is Not About to Launch a Major Attack Against Our Country’

Wednesday during CNN town hall, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein downplayed the threat of a “major” terror attack from ISIS on the United States.

According to Stein, the threats to the United States won’t be solved through current policy, which she said was “fanning the flames of terrorism.” Instead, she called for a “peace offensive,” which she said would include a weapons embargo and a freezing of funds of those countries funding terror.

Partial transcript as follows:

QUESTION: Dr. Stein, you said that you oppose the use of U.S. forces overseas. U.S. forces are currently engaged in air strikes against ISIS and other military operations. My question is, do you consider ISIS to be a threat to the U.S. or to U.S. allies and partners in the Middle East? And if so, what would you do to defeat ISIS that the Obama administration is not currently doing?

STEIN: So, you know, there are rules of engagement, international rules that if you’re going to attack another country, you need to be at imminent threat of being actually attacked by them. Clearly, that threshold has not been met. ISIS is not about to launch a major attack against our country.

And we have a track record now of fighting terrorism, not only ISIS, but Al Qaida before it, the Taliban before that. And this track record is not looking so good. We have spent $6 trillion, according to a recent Harvard study when you include the costs, the ongoing costs of health care for our wounded veterans, who deserve the highest care possible, $6 trillion, which — since 2001.

We have killed a million people in Iraq alone, which is not winning us the hearts and minds in the Middle East. We have lost tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers that have been killed or severely wounded. And what do we have to show for this? Failed states, mass refugee migrations, and repeated terrorist threats that get worse with each cycle.

So ISIS grew out of the catastrophe of Iraq. Al Qaida in turn grew out of Afghanistan. And in fact, in Afghanistan, it was the CIA and the Saudis together who created the first so-called jihadi movement with the Mujahedeen in order to make trouble against the Soviet Union. So this has been a very ill-conceived plan that has been back-firing madly against us.

So what we say is that we need a new kind of offensive in the Middle East, because bombing terrorism and shooting terrorism is not quelling terrorism. It’s only fanning the flames of terrorism, the misery and the poverty that drives terrorism.

We are calling for a new kind of offensive, a peace offensive in the Middle East, that begins with a weapons embargo. And since we are supplying — we, the U.S., is supplying the majority of the weapons to actually all combatants, we and our allies are arming most of the fighting forces in the Middle East, we can initiate that weapons embargo, and we also call for a freeze on the funding of those countries who continue to support jihadi terrorist enterprises.

Hillary Clinton herself said in a leaked State Department memo that, in fact, the Saudis are still the major funder of terrorist Sunni enterprises. So if we started it, we and our allies have the capacity to shut it down. That’s how we need to move forward.

(h/t WFB)

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