Hillary Clinton used a lot of adjectives to describe the Islamic State terrorist group during Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, but “Islamic” was not one of them.
A day after a wave of terrorist attacks believed to be carried out by the Islamic State rocked Paris, Clinton refused to identify the terrorist group — or any terrorist groups — as Islamic, arguing that mentioning the religion of terrorist groups alienates Muslim countries.
“Our prayers are with the people of France tonight, but that is not enough,” Clinton said in her opening statement. “We need to have a resolve that will bring the world together to root out the kind of radical jihadist ideology that motivates organizations like ISIS — a barbaric, ruthless, violent, jihadist terrorist group.”
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Later in the debate, CBS moderator John Dickerson picked up on her careful word choice, asking her to react to Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio’s declaration that the U.S. was at war with “radical Islam.”
Clinton started answering by saying, “I don’t think we’re at war with Islam. I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists.”
But Dickerson then interjected, noting that Rubio didn’t say the war was against all of Islam, but “radical Islam.”
Clinton then explained the thinking behind her reluctance to describe radical Islamic terrorism.
“I think you can talk about Islamists who are clearly also jihadists but I think it’s not particularly helpful,” she said. “We’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries. We’ve got to make them part of our coalition. If they hear people running for president basically short-cut it to say, we are somehow at war against Islam.”
She stopped herself and then added, “That was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, that George W. Bush made after 9/11, when he basically said after going to a mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims, we are at war with violent extremism, we are at war with people who use their religion for the purposes of power and oppression and yes, we are at war with those people, but I don’t want to be painting with too broad a brush.”
