Obama speech last night from Oval Office, Obama calls San Bernardino killings

“The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it”, Obama said.

Well, Obama refused to say (he just can’t say it), that we are at WAR with RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS.

Obama provided an update on the San Bernardino attack and discussed the broader threat of terrorism.

The FBI is investigating the paramilitary-style attack in California as inspired by IS, which controls swaths of Syria and Iraq and has shown an expanded reach beyond its Middle East strongholds, including complicity in the recent attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

Obama told Americans that their fear of such attacks as what happened on Wednesday at California social services centre was justified.

INSKEEP: He also argued that his strategy to defeat ISIS, the group that has been calling for such attacks, will work.

Obama may have given Sunday’s speech from the Oval Office because his team believes his message on his strategy to defeat ISIS isn’t getting through to the American people. We should also put in place stronger screening for those who come to America without a visa so that we can take a hard look at whether they’ve travelled to war zones.

There have been reports that the couple that killed the people in California had been acting under the orders of Islamic State. All Western societies now feel at risk from the violence of the Islamic State and its followers, even though the group’s capabilities are limited and it does not pose an existential threat in the long run.

“What we can do”, he said, “and must do, is make it harder for them to kill”.

He wanted Americans to know he is doing all he can to keep them safe from terrorism and that he is authorizing adequate surveillance and scrutiny to identify would-be terrorists before they strike.

Last week’s massacre, if proven to be linked to or motivated by foreign Islamist militancy, would be the deadliest such incident on US soil on Obama’s watch and since the September 11, 2001, attacks on NY and Washington.

The president also urged Americans not to respond to the threats, with fear and at the same time not to provoke anger against Muslims because it will only fuel for the propaganda that the Islamic State has been spreading.

On Thursday, as investigators were searching for a motive, Obama said at the White House that the shootings could have been terrorist-related or workplace-related. “And I will shut down the broken immigration system that is letting jihadists into our country. They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world – including millions of patriotic Muslim Americans who reject their hateful ideology”, Obama said.