Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has a problem with President Barack Obama’s refusal to call acts of terrorism like the one perpetrated Sunday in Orlando “radical Islam.”
A day after President Barack Obama laced into his Republican critics and Donald Trump for slamming his rejection of the term “radical Islam,” the West Virginia senator told “Fox & Friends” that he does not “know a Muslim in West Virginia or a Muslim anywhere in the country that doesn’t believe that these people are radical if they have been radicalized to the point they want to kill innocent people or themselves.”
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Manchin said he had not been briefed on terminology as a strategy to defeat the Islamic State or other terrorist groups.
“If we could start using the term radical Islamists it shouldn’t offend moderate Muslims, because they’re not radical Islamists. And if we leave them in power for four and a half years, you know they’re just going to get stronger. They have a legal system, they have a tax system. They have a news service. How does that show that we’re effective in fighting ISIS?” Brian Kilmeade asked.
Manchin responded, “I know. And you know what, we have had radical Christians, we have had people go into the churches, Christians, and kill people,” alluding to last June’s shooting at a South Carolina church.
Just as Obama has referred to Christian terrorism in the past, as he did last November following a shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic, Manchin said the president should have said “radical Islam.”
“I would say that. I believe that they’re radical. Very radical. Anyone that acts this way, and people want to do so much harm to people—innocent people and people of their own faith,” he continued. “So I don’t know, but as far as the strategy of how we’re going to defeat ISIS, I don’t think that that’s part of the strategy. But basically not being—not saying it and identifying them I believe that I don’t have a problem with that and the president has given his reasons why he’s not.”
Kilmeade asked, “But you would do it?”
“I would do it in a heartbeat,” Manchin said.
By: Nick Gass, Politico