Led strikes hit Islamic State fuel trucks: statement

No. 4. The Islamic State has a strategy.

“We must wage the war to defeat the enemy, not merely to harass it. For over a year, the president has clung to the hope that an air campaign is sufficient”.

“They know this is their fight, but they must have leadership and support and resolve from the United States of America”.

“Now on the other hand, Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them”, Cruz added. So were the French. American and British Special Operations forces have for months been conducting secret surveillance missions in Libya to monitor the rise of fighters aligned with the Islamic State. Others may include sharpening divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe – and forcing the West into a hard choice of either backing off or being drawn into what IS would see as a holy war in Syria and Iraq.

In effect, Obama was staking out a position against a deeper US involvement in Syria’s civil war – whose chaos has allowed ISIS to thrive – that he will try to defend for the waning 14 months of his presidency.

Obama also said most of the Islamic State’s victims were Muslims and therefore, “this is not a “Muslim” problem”.

The dispatch said the Iraqis had no specific details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official told the AP that French intelligence gets this kind of communication “all the time” and “every day”. Constantly calibrating the proper balance, even in an age of terrorism, is critical. And he brushed aside those who call for sending USA ground troops into the region, saying that “would be a mistake” and wouldn’t work unless the US was committed to being a permanent occupying force in the region.

Those attacks were the deadliest acts of terrorism in France since the 1961 Vitry-Le-François train bombing. It seems that nearly everyone else in the world gets this, except Obama and his handpicked pundits.

It’s no longer the economy, stupid. Globally, the United States will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017, up from 70,000 in each of the previous two years, Robert Jenkins, a U.S. AID official, told a Washington forum on Friday. Unfortunately, grandstanding has torpedoed any inkling of substantive discussion, and analysis has given way to increased demonization.

And opponents who believe that Obama undermines the possibility for the use of limited but potentially effective force by painting all military action as equaling vast infantry deployments will also have seen little to ease their frustration.

“These are obviously ambitious goals”, Obama said.

Syrian refugees are the flashpoint of the political debate, and the metaphor for our real fears. It seeks to consolidate territorial control in Syria and Iraq and then expand its so-called “caliphate” throughout the Muslim world and beyond. Now, they are disputing White House assurances that Syrians granted US asylum will be subjected to thorough screening and vetting.

But Sen. Rand Paul is offering a bill to halt visas for refugees. “I think they’re doing everything they can do and people just need to be patient”, said SanJuan Wheeler of Atlanta. It’s a thin line between honest worries and prejudice, one the Islamic State wants us to cross.

NY City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is anxious that law enforcement has been rendered blind, that terrorists are discussing plots through encrypted communications on cellphones that can’t be accessed by either the hardware manufacturer or investigators. Without, in other words, a “back door” quick fix.

Amid a global outpouring of grief and sympathy for France, US lawmakers note America is also in IS’ crosshairs. Our security could depend on having this information.

Before attackers apparently aligned with the terrorist group ISIS hit Paris with simultaneous bombing and shooting attacks, the organization had suffered a number of setbacks throughout the week. This politically correct insanity was responsible for our failure to investigate Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s known connections to violent Islamist ideas, and that failure arguably resulted in the deaths of thirteen people. But we must balance that strength with wisdom, and make sure that we continue to live by the principles that have made this nation a bastion of freedom.