Hillary Clinton outlines plan to stop ISIS from recruiting online

“Promising to carpet-bomb until the desert glows doesn’t make you sound strong; it makes you sound like you’re in over your head”, Mrs. Clinton said in a speech Tuesday in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota, taking a jab at Sen.

Thomson ReutersDemocratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stands beneath a banner as she is introduced before addressing the 2015 National Immigrant Integration Conference in New YorkMINNEAPOLIS, Minn.

Mrs. Clinton pressed for shutting down the Islamic State’s recruitment efforts online, thus preventing foreign fighters from coming into the USA, through better data-sharing efforts with European allies. Clinton’s campaign is still largely organized around themes of middle-class economic empowerment, but she has sought to showcase her national security experience and hawkish policy positions in the wake of the mass attacks in Paris and California.

Mrs Clinton acknowledged that there would be civil liberties issues that must be resolved, and even before she spoke, her main challenger for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, issued a Twitter post that went to the heart of that vulnerability.

“Bluster and bigotry are not credentials for becoming commander in chief”, Clinton said.

Clinton has been sharply critical of Republican front-runner Donald Trump for his proposals to suspend Muslim immigration and stop the resettlement of Syrian refugees, saying it sunders American values and feeds the Islamic State narrative that the United States is an enemy of Islam.

Clinton also called for stricter screenings for visa applicants who had been to a country in Islamic State-controlled areas in the last five years.

Clinton’s decision to deliver her speech in Minnesota is not without significance. “Terrorists use guns to kill Americans and I think we should make it a lot harder for them to do that”.

Clinton also called for empowering Muslim-American communities here in the U.S.

“Clinton is still linking terrorism to gun control, still standing by failed government bureaucracy and still echoing President Obama’s exhausted rhetoric”, said Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for the GOP-leaning America Rising PAC.

In addition, the former secretary of state highlighted the importance of working closely with Muslim-American communities and the location for the speech was no accident. She has repeatedly said that the fight against ISIS needs to take place in the air, on the ground, and in cyberspace, but stressed that a full-scale war with American troops in the Middle East would not be wise. Just last week, a ninth Minnesota man was arrested on a charge of conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State group. Clinton took advantage of a previously scheduled fund-raising party here to use Minneapolis as a platform to address the specific problem of domestic radicalization.

In Minneapolis, Clinton said Silicon Valley technology companies should redouble their efforts to identify the messages of violent extremists used to recruit followers.