WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has rejected demands for labelling the US fight against terrorism as a war on radical Islam or any kind of “religious war,” insisting that such labels hurt efforts to root out radical ideologies in Muslim communities.
“I think that the way to understand this is there is an element growing out of Muslim communities in certain parts of the world that have perverted the religion, have embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam. And they’re doing damage in a lot of countries around the world,” he said in an interview with CNN aired Sunday.
“But it is absolutely true that I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognise it as being Islam,” the president told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The interview was taped in New Delhi during Obama’s visit to India.
Obama also cautioned against the risk of overplaying the threat of terror groups and said the US should instead align itself with the overwhelming majority of Muslims who reject the radical ideology and tactics of terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
“I don’t quibble with labels. I think we all recognise that this is a particular problem that has roots in Muslim communities,” Obama said. “But I think we do ourselves a disservice in this fight if we are not taking into account the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject this ideology.”
Republicans have criticised Obama in recent weeks for refusing to label the terror threat the US and the West faces as Islamic extremism or rooted in radical Islam. Obama stuck to condemning the terrorism and violent extremism.
“We are in a religious war with radical Islamists,” Senator Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Fox News earlier this month. “When I hear the President of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.”
But Obama said the US needs to be wary of handing terrorists “the victory of overinflating” their actions and the threat they pose to the US.
President Obama emphasised that while he is mindful of the “terrible costs of terrorism,” terror groups aren’t an “existential threat to the United States or the world order.”
“The truth of the matter is that they can do harm. But we have the capacity to control how we respond in ways that do not undercut what’s the essence of who we are. That means that we don’t torture, for example, and thereby undermine our values and credibility around the world,” Obama said. “It means that we don’t approach this with a strategy of sending out occupying armies and playing whack-a-mole wherever a terrorist group appears because that drains our economic strength and it puts enormous burdens on our military.”
The US needs to instead keep its response “surgical,” Obama said, to address the specific threat the US faces without alienating the majority of Muslims who are peaceful and reject extremism - those who “have embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam.”
Obama also saw the Middle East and South Asia as grounds zero in terms of winning back hearts and minds of young people.
Anchor Zakaria pointed to US support to undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and asked, “is the theory of authoritarian stability back?”
“I don’t think so,” Obama said. “I think that if you look at all my statements, what I’ve always said is that in applying US foreign policy, we can never operate as if the world as it is doesn’t exist. We’ve got friends and allies who help us with strategic interests, who also engage in practices that don’t meet our test of human rights or democracy.
“And what we can do is to encourage them to move in a new direction but, you know, often times we’re going to have to make decisions based on the here and now and our strategic interests.
“What I continue to believe is that an authoritarian model, in this day and age, is going to be less and less sustainable. And I think we’ve seen evidence of that around the world. Part of it is just the flow of information. Authoritarian to some degree depends on the ignorance of people, and the Internet and social media means people have access to information.
“Authoritarian regimes rely to a large extent on tamping down people’s expectations. People’s expectations are constantly rising today, especially among young people. And so a government model that does not rely ultimately on legitimacy and consent but rather relies on force is not ultimately going to be effective.”