President Obama should launch a campaign to “to expose Islamist terror attacks on fellow Muslims,” House Republican Whip Eric Cantor told a conservative audience during a national security policy speech Tuesday morning, “instead of apologizing to the Arab world.”
“Every time the Taliban blows up innocent Muslim women and children in Pakistan or al-Qaida strikes in Iraq or in any other Arab country, we must broadcast to the world the faces of the victims and point out their killers,” Cantor said at Tuesday’s “Protect America Month” lecture series sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.
“In the battle of ideas, we win when the people of the Middle East see that the real threat to Muslims is neither America nor Israel nor Britain, but the ruthless Islamist terrorists.”
Obama has, however, made the point more than once that Islamic terrorists kill Muslims more than any other group.
“Most of the blood on their hands is the blood of Muslims, who al Qaeda has killed and maimed in far greater numbers than any other people,” Obama said in March 2009.
And in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world in June 2009, Obama said that Al Qaida has “killed people of different faiths — but more than any other, they have killed Muslims.”
“Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam,” Obama said.
Cantor, delivering a speech on the same day it was announced that the government arrested Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a sport utility vehicle in New York’s Times Square, warned that in the days between these high profile incidents, the country seems to forget about the continuous threat of terrorism.
“Yet with each close encounter, my fear is that the country goes on heightened alert on so long as the media covers it,” he said.