President Obama again chose his words carefully when he spoke of the Islamic terrorist threat facing the nation in his sweeping State of the Union speech, choosing to describe terrorism as “violent extremism” while avoiding linking it to Muslim radicals.
Trying to elevate his fight against jihadists “to a smarter kind of American leadership” that combines military might with strong diplomacy, Obama said the United States provides the best leadership when America builds international coalitions to fight terrorists instead of using military strength to respond unilaterally.
“I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership,” he said Tuesday night in his State of the Union address. “We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy; when we leverage our power with coalition building; when we don’t let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents.”
“That’s exactly what we’re doing right now — and around the globe, it is making a difference,” he added.
But Obama’s decision to avoid describing the threat as emanating from a warped interpretation of Islam or mentioning al Qaeda by name did nothing to satisfy even centrist Republicans who take issue with his language.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a former chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, argued that Obama should not avoid the Islamic extremism label.
“[Obama] would be more forceful in outlining a strategy if he would identify the threat as Islamic extremism or the perversion of Islam,” she told the Washington Examiner. “He seems to be very hesitant to name the threat and that makes it more difficult for us to come up with effective strategies to counter the threat.”
Collins also made the point that Obama should outline a more robust strategy to deal with the threat of homegrown terrorism, which she said she has been urging him to do for years.
“I believe radicalization is occurring in our prisons system, for example, and he does not appear to have a strategy for dealing with that at all,” she said.
Many prominent Democrats had the opposite view, praising Obama’s careful language describing the threat from extremists without linking it to Islam in any way.
“I don’t think at the end of the day that it matters a lot. I find it foolish that people are criticizing him for not saying ‘Islamic violence,’ ” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, in an interview. “He’s saying that it profanes a religion — it’s anti-Islamic violence.”
“The people who are doing it are violating all the tenets of the religion,” Kaine continued. “So I think it’s important to not to use language that paints with a broad brush the activity of one of the three great three Abrahamic faiths. These people are profaning Islam and clerics around the world are saying this is a profanation of Islam.”
Obama’s assertions that “American leadership” is stopping the Islamic State’s advance and is preventing another U.S. ground war in the Middle East by enlisting Arab countries’ support also did nothing to mollify GOP critics of the policy the same day that the U.S. was pulling its diplomats out of Yemen as militants in that country threatened the capital of Sanaa.
Several Republicans interviewed for this article said Obama needs to do more to speed up the training of fighters from Arab countries allied with the U.S. because airstrikes on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are having little impact on the Islamic State beyond blunting the Islamic group’s momentum.
Last year, in his State of the Union address, Obama declared that the U.S. was moving off a permanent war footing. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the president failed to predict that Islamic extremists in Syria would metastasize and give a safe haven for the Islamic State to grow and become emboldened.
Corker also recalled how Obama last fall cited Yemen as an example of how his administration is defeating Islamic extremism.
“While we’re standing here, the capitol [of Yemen] is being taken over by extremists that are being funded by Iran,” he told the Examiner. “So again, what has happened in Paris, unfortunately, has been a wake up call. And I think that all western countries realize that this is going to be a long-term issue — this is not something that’s going away in the next few years and we’re going to have to have a long-term mechanism and a way of working together to deal with this.”
Corker also took issue with Obama’s avoidance of references to Islamic extremism.
“Look, we’re dealing with people who have taken a religion and in the name of that religion are killing people and beheading people — and that is a fact,” he said.
While Obama tried to build his address around recent improvements in the U.S. economy, the Paris attacks, Boko Haram’s mass massacres in Nigeria and extremist militants siege of the Yemeni capital, and ongoing efforts to combat terrorism worldwide was a major sub-theme of the night.
Democratic and Republican members of Congress held up yellow pencils at different points of the speech to support freedom of speech and show solidarity with the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked just two weeks ago for printing cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.
While Democrats participated in the show of the State of the Union solidarity with Paris, the raised pencils also reminded Americans of Obama’s failure to show up or send a high-profile administration official for a march of solidarity in Paris the Sunday after the attack in which more than 40 world leaders participated.
The president also faced high-profile criticism of his executive action normalizing relations with Cuba. Obama defended his December executive action taking steps to re-establish diplomatic and business ties with Cuba and recognized freed Cuban prisoner Alan Gross by inviting Gross and his wife as high-profile guests of first lady Michelle Obama.
“In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date,” he said. “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new.”
The shift in Cuba policy “has the potential to end a legacy of mistrust in our hemisphere, removes a phony excuse for restrictions in Cuba, stands up for democratic values and extends the hand of friendship to the Cuban people,” he said, urging Congress to begin the work of ending the trade embargo between the two countries.
“And after years in prison, we’re overjoyed that Alan Gross is back where he belongs. Welcome home, Alan,” he said.
Other Republicans countered the move by inviting dissidents who talked to the press before the speech and told gut-wrenching tales of oppression by the Castro regime. They argued that the Obama-Castro deal and more commerce between the two countries would only hand Cuban President Raul Castro more power and weaken the island’s resistance movement.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, signaled his opposition to Obama’s dealmaking with Castro by inviting a top Cuban dissident, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, who is known as “Antunez,” as his personal guest.
Antunez, the 50-year-old leader of Cuba’s civic resistance movement, served more than 17 years in prison, with the Castro regime only releasing him in 2007 to try to ward off expected European sanctions.
In an interview with the Examiner one day before the speech, Antunez decried the “secrecy” in which the Obama administration conducted negotiations with Castro and deemed the deal “illegitimate” because it did not include talks with resistance leaders or the Cuban people.
Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, two Florida Republicans and prominent Cuban-Americans in Congress, also hosted Cuban dissidents as their guests Tuesday night.
Rubio has invited Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo, a Cuban Christian Liberation Movement activist whose father, Oswaldo Paya, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, was killed in 2012 in a car crash under suspicious circumstances.
Ros-Lehtinen, a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, brought Alejandre Triana, the daughter of an American pilot and decorated Vietnam veteran the Castro regime killed in 1996.
In February of that year, members of the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue were in a pair of Cessnas flying over international waters near the island. The Cuban Air Force shot the planes out of the sky, killing three American pilots and one longtime U.S. resident.
Before Obama’s speech, Ros-Lehtinen cast the issue of Cuba as a matter of grave national security.
“It is important for us to come together to show the other side of the Cuban regime — what is really going on in Castro’s Cuba,” she said. “American national security continues to be in jeopardy due to the Cuban regime’s cozy relationship with countries like Russia.”
“As we speak,” she said, Russia has a spy ship docked in Havana.
“I know that is sounds very Cold-War-esque, but it’s a reality that’s happening in today’s Cuba,” she continued.
“There is lots of talk about how tourism is so good for the Cuban people, but it has not brought the Cuban people any closer to human rights, freedom and democracy.”
