Hillary Clinton focused on her real enemy – Americans who disagree with her – in a campaign speech on Thursday.
In a statement her own campaign Tweeted out as her marquee comment, Clinton declared: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”
The UK Daily Mail describes Clinton as “reading her speech at a brisk clip from a teleprompter at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City,” but slowing down to mock Republicans over the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” which “Republicans often accuse President Barack Obama of purposefully avoiding.”
The Daily Mail cheekily notes that Clinton “referred repeatedly to ‘radical jihadism’ as a global scourge, but didn’t explain how the concept of jihadism is consistent with the notion that adherents of the world’s second largest religion are wholly uninvolved.”
The rest of her remarks are summarized as follows:
Blaming ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ for vicious attacks of the sort that killed 129 people last Friday in Paris, she said, ‘isn’t just a distraction.’ Affiliating them with a religion ‘gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve.’
In the end, Clinton insisted, the Obama administration enjoyed some success by decoupling its strategy to defeat al-Qaeda from its religious underpinnings.
‘Our priority should be how to fight the enemy,’ she said. ‘In the end it didn’t matter what kind of terrorist we called [Osama] bin Laden. It mattered that we killed bin Laden.’
She also backed the president’s call for an America open to Syrian refugees, saying that the United States can’t ‘turn our backs on those in need.’
Clinton particularly warned against ‘discriminating against Muslims,’ saying that ‘many of these refugees are fleeing the same terrorists who threaten us.’
She did, however, call for ground troops to fight the 100 percent non-Islamic Islamic State, which is a significant departure from President Obama’s foreign policy… although she doesn’t want too many ground troops.
While Clinton was speaking, word came in that an American has been killed by Palestinian terrorists, who have absolutely nothing to do with Islam, in Israel.