If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into.
If we look at the last decades, we see that the US rightist-fundamentalist alliance demonized partnership-oriented families and painted women's rights as a threat to "tradition" - which of course it is to traditions of domination. These people had an integrated political agenda that recognizes that a "traditional" authoritarian, male dominated, punitive family is foundational to an authoritarian, male dominated, punitive politics. We can see this connection in sharp relief in brutal top-down regimes, be they secular like Nazi Germany or religious like ISIS in the Middle East.
I plead that it's very difficult when you deal with ISIS and organizations like that whose behavior is so barbaric and so vicious that it doesn't seem to have any purpose other than lust for killing and power and that's very difficult to put ourselves in the other shoe.
It cannot be an American fight. And I think what the president [Barack Obama] has consistently said - which I agree with - is that we will support those who take the fight to ISIS. That is why we have troops in Iraq that are helping to train and build back up the Iraqi military, why we have special operators in Syria working with the Kurds and Arabs, so that we can be supportive.
What's important to do is we must deal frontally with this threat of radical Islamists, especially from ISIS. This is the most sophisticated terror group that has ever threatened the world or the United States of America.
Well, at this point, it looks like the Iraqi forces are moving into the city center itself. Now they've been working on this for seven months now. The American military's been pushing them and encouraging them to really get into the city and rout ISIS. So now they're finally doing it.
I think we have to get NATO to go into the Middle East with us, in addition to surrounding nations, and we have to knock the hell out of ISIS, and we have to do it fast, when ISIS formed in this vacuum created by Barack Obama and Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.
There is no doubt that the actions of ISIS are designed to amplify their power and the threat that they pose. That helps them recruit. That adds in the twisted thoughts of some young person that they might want to have carry out an action that somehow they're part of a larger movement.
Nobody's going to vote for Isis.
I can only tell you there's a lot of bad things going on. They're chopping off heads in Syria, and they're chopping off heads all over the Middle East. ISIS is doing a number, and plenty of other beyond ISIS is doing it now. And all I know is that, when they start chopping off heads, we have to be very firm, we have to be very strong, we have to be very vigilant. And I heard a statement, and I disagree with his statement.
It's a response from Donald Trump [to the Pope]. It says, "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS. . . " Their primary thing. . . You've seen what they've done all over the Middle East. Their primary goal is to get to the Vatican. That would be their ultimate trophy. They want to do what they won't to all of these magnificence artifacts and all of the beautiful museums that they've totally destroyed all over the Middle East, right?
Constraint theory argues a number of things. First, that the impossible has to be identified. Second, that the actor is then constrained by circumstances to act a certain way. For example, should we invade ISIS? Can we invade ISIS? What would it take to invade ISIS? Once you ask that question you discover the price of that option and then you take a look at American politics and see that the country is probably not prepared to invest the 2 to 3 million people that it would take to defeat ISIS and the insurgency afterwards. All right, so that's not going to happen.
We have organizations, whether it is ISIS or Al Qaida, who do believe we should go back several thousand years. We should make women third-class citizens, that we should allow children to be sexually assaulted. They are a danger to modern society.
If [President Obama] does not go on the offensive against ISIS. . . they are coming here. This is just not about Baghdad, this is just not about Syria, this is about our homeland. And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.
We do have special forces, we do have trainers, we do have the military personnel who are helping with the airstrikes that the United States is leading so that we can try to take out ISIS infrastructure, take out their leadership.
In short, ISIS is composed of religiously motivated psychopaths.
Even the U. S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS.
We didn't create ISIS. ISIS created ISIS.
Russia wants to defeat ISIS as badly as America does. If we had a relationship with Russia, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could work on it together and knock the hell out of ISIS? Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?
Donald Trump is behaving in an extremely provocative way toward China, having first cancelled the TPP and alienated America's friends in the region. Same thing that he's authorizing much riskier gambits against ISIS, having alienated many of America's allies and friends in the region.