After video surfaced over the weekend of ISIS beheading an American aid worker, President Obama released a statement saying the terror group’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”
Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who is gearing up to run for president again in 2016, says proclamations like that are just “wrong.”
“To suggest that these people are not Muslims is wrong,” Santorum said in a Tuesday interview with The Daily Caller. “It’s just inaccurate. And it is politically correct.”
Santorum has emphasized this argument recently, including during a recent speech at Liberty University where he said: “I’m not saying all Muslims are terrorists, but we have an obligation to face the truth about who the enemy is and what they want to accomplish.”
Asked to elaborate, Santorum said: “The truth here is these folks are not Zoroastrians, they’re not Buddhists. These are folks who are looking at the scriptures of the Koran.”
“They are looking at and drawing from Islamic texts,” Santorum said. “And you can say, ‘well, they are misinterpreting them,’ and that’s all well and good. But you can say that about a whole variety of different religions.”
“And that doesn’t mean when a Presbyterian gets up and says, ‘well the scripture says this.’ And a Catholic gets up and says, ‘it really means this,’ it doesn’t mean that they’re not Christians. You can say ‘well, they may be way off in their Christianity.’ Well that’s fine. You have to accept the fact that they’re drawing from the same text that all Muslims draw from,” the Republican said.
Santorum, who won the Iowa Republican caucuses in 2012, will travel to Chicago Wednesday to deliver a national security speech at Northwestern University. He said it will be a “nuts and bolts” lesson on what “we have learned in the last century, both fighting the great -isms of the 20th century plus what we’ve learned over the last dozen years or so from our interaction with this new threat.”
Asked to sum up the Santorum foreign policy doctrine, he said: “The importance of a strong America — both in our capabilities and the clarity of our mission.”
Asked what national security issues worry him most these days, he said, “It continues to be the jihadists. The jihadism of sort of both strains. Number one, the ISIS strain that is aggressive in promoting terror. In this case, just like the Taliban tried to in a foothold in a region so they can then use that region to organize and project terror around the world.”
“That’s an immediate concern,” Santorum said. “One that we have to pay attention to and defeat. We have to confront it and defeat it. And not pussyfoot around. And I think what the president is doing is simply responding, as a political instinct that he has to do something, but with no real intent to decisively defeat this enemy.”
Santorum said Iran is an equal concern: “These talks, which are scheduled to conclude here in a few days, are a grave concern to me — that we have a president who is desperate for a treaty.”
“I don’t see anything in the Iranians that would lead him to believe they would do anything to actually limit their desire to achieve a nuclear weapon in the relatively near future,” he said. “I’m hopeful the president will not sign a bad deal.”
For now, Santorum is putting in place a team to get ready to run in 2016, though wouldn’t acknowledge he is definitely running. “There’s always a chance you don’t run,” he said.
But then he added: “Right now, we’re going through the process of building a team and trying to build the resources and put together a really strong message that I think could get it right in the center of America and help unite the country.”
“That’s the objective,” he said. “To try to have a message, and deliver that message in a way that can bring America together. And that’s what we’re focused on right now.”
