Recently American forces blew up a building containing a lot of ISIS’s money.
Osama Bin Ladin is dead, and President Obama ordered strikes that have taken out seven potential candidates slated to lead the terrorist network.
Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, the leader of the Taliban, has been killed in a U.S. airstrike on the de facto headquarters of the Afghan Taliban.
Abu Nabil, the senior leader in Libya was targeted in an air strike carried out by F-15 aircraft on a compound in the city of Derna.
A senior leader of al-Shabaab in Somalia has been killed.
U.S. forces killed the al Qaeda operative in charge of suicide bombings and operations involving explosives.
The leader of al Qaeda in Yemen and the perpetrator of the Benghazi attack are dead.
But none of this actually happened, apparently, because the only real effective way to have accomplished these and other anti-terrorism successes is to use the term “radical Islam”.
President Obama hasn’t used it, and the Republicans are demanding he does so that his successes will be legitimate.
President Barack Obama explained why he does not use that term.
It grants them a religious legitimacy they don’t deserve.
“They are not religious leaders; they are terrorists. We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
ISIS wants to portray itself as a group of holy warriors defending Islam so that it can propagate the idea that Western countries are at war with Islam, which is how it recruits and radicalizes young people.
“We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie,” Obama said.
“They no more represent Islam than any madman who kills in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism,” he said. “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”
But for Republicans, that is not good enough.
They want magic while blocking reality.