Obama says U.S. ‘at war with those who pervert Islam’

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. President Barack Obama says the U.S. is "not at war with Islam - we are at war with the people who have perverted Islam". He was speaking to representatives from 60 nations attending a three-day event on extremism that follows attacks in Denmark and France, BBC News reports.

Obama said the world had to confront the ideologies that radicalize people. He said those heading groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda were not religious leaders but terrorists.

Obama said associating Islamic State or al Qaeda with Islam would be buying into the propaganda of those groups, challenging critics who have questioned him for not describing recent attacks as the work of "Islamic radicals".

Obama has asked Congress formally to authorize military force against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. and its partners have carried out air strikes against the group since last year.

Obama said the fight against violent extremism could not be won by military power alone. Communities, he said, must do their part. "These terrorists are a threat first and foremost to the communities they target," he said.

He added that there were Muslims around the world who did not necessarily subscribe to the violent tactics of IS, but who "buy into" the notion that Islam had been "polluted" by Western values.

"It makes individuals… more ripe for radicalization," he said. "Muslim leaders need to do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam."

Obama also wrote an editorial published by the Los Angeles Times. In the piece he said groups like al Qaeda and [IS] "exploit the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them with no chance of improving their lives".

"The world has to offer today's youth something better," he wrote, adding "governments that deny human rights play into the hands of extremists".

And in both his speech and the editorial, Obama referenced the recent murders of three Muslim students in North Carolina. "We do not yet know why three young people, who were Muslim Americans, were brutally killed in Chapel Hill, NC. But we know that many Muslim Americans across our country are worried and afraid."