Know Your Enemy
President Obama spent half of his recent national security speech dealing with why he doesn’t call the ideology of  the biggest terror threat “radical Islam”. Republicans have noticed that he has refused to use that term for years, and he finally addressed why. But are his reasons reasonable? And why is calling the threat by this name such a big deal?
I’ll explain why it is such a big deal. And I’ll have to break my self-imposed time limit to do so (but not by much).
Mentioned links:
WATCH: President Obama’s Press Conference on Orlando and the Phrase “Radical Islam”
Remarks by the President After Counter-ISIL Meeting (full transcript of the speech)
President Obama on ISIS Fight: ‘We Don’t Yet Have a Complete Strategy’
Hillary Clinton: I’ll say the words ‘radical Islamism’

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Show transcript
President Obama came out of a meeting with his National Security Council on June 14th and gave a speech on what they had discussed; most notably their efforts to destroy ISIL/ISIS. This meeting had been planned  before the Orlando nightclub shooting, but that shooting, and the shooter’s alleged support of ISIS, gave this meeting and subsequent speech a bigger impact. However, I don’t want to talk about the part of the speech where the President listed the items they talked about. I want to focus on what he discussed in the second half of it; his use of the term “radical Islam” when describing terrorism, or rather, his lack of use of the term. Here is the President.
And let me make a final point.
Let me just note that, in a 25-minute speech about dealing with ISIL in...