President Obama on Wednesday slammed Ted Cruz’s proposal to monitor majority-Muslim neighborhoods for terrorist activities as “wrong and un-American,” but also said it would only hurt U.S. efforts to fight the Islamic State.
“I just left a country that engages in that kind of surveillance which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped, to America, the land of the free,” he said, referring to Cuba.
Speaking in Argentina, Obama also criticized Cruz’s pledge to carpet-bomb the Islamic State.
“Not only is that contrary to our values,” he said, but “that would be an extraordinary mechanism for ISIL to recruit more people.”
Obama used his remarks to defend his strategy against the Islamic State, and said the extremist group’s leadership is “hunkered down” as a result of that strategy.
One day after the terrorist group claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in Brussels, Belgium, Obama said the U.S.-led coalition fighting against the group has taken away 40 percent of their territory.
“ISIL’s leadership has been hunkered down, and we will continue to press on them until they are driven out of their strongholds and destroyed,” he said, referring to the group by another acronynm.
“While we are doing that, we are extra vigilant about preventing attacks in Europe … but this is difficult work … It’s challenging to find the identity of small groups of people who are willing to die themselves and can walk into a crowd and detonate a bomb,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, but my top priority is to defeat ISIL and eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that’s been taking place all around the world,” he added. “So there’s no more important item on my agenda than going after them and defeating them. The issue is how do we do it in an intelligent way.”
