Newsmax - Ted Cruz: Obama in 'Bizarre Doublespeak' on Radical Islam

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By Melissa Clyne

President Barack Obama's refusal to identify radical Muslims as the perpetrators of acts of jihad around the world, referring to them only as extremists with no mention of their religion, is some sort of "bizarre, politically correct doublespeak … simply not befitting a commander in chief," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday on Fox News' "The Kelly File."

It's stupefying, according to Cruz, that the White House could hold a summit on violent extremism without identifying that it's Islamists we are fighting.

"It is targeted at Christians, it is targeted Jews, it's targeted Muslims in the region who do not accede to the radical Islamist view, and unfortunately the president and this administration dogmatically refuses to utter the words radical Islamic terrorism," he said.

"You cannot defeat an enemy if you refuse to acknowledge what it is."

The notion that somehow identifying the terrorists as Islamic extremists would give them what they want, as well as undermine the effort to build a global coalition to fight them, is ludicrous, according to Cruz.

"What undermines the global effort is for the president of the United States to be an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists," he said.

He also derided Obama's "strange moral relativism" at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, where he compared Islamic extremism to the Crusades.

"The last I checked, the Crusades began a millennium ago and I don't think it's too much to ask the president to stay in the current millennium," he said.

It would be far more appropriate for the president of the free world to demonstrate the kind of courage and leadership shown by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is a Muslim.

"In Cairo (he) gave a speech that was courageous when he called out the radical Islamic terrorism," Cruz said. "He said, we Muslims need to stand up together against these radical terrorist who are perverting our faith and turning it into a mandate for murder.

"Why don't we see the president in the United States demonstrating that same courage, just to speak the truth about the face at the evil we're facing right now?"

At the White House summit on counterterrorism on Wednesday, Obama said "there is no one profile of a violent extremist or terrorist" and "there is no way to predict who will come radicalized."

"We are not at war with Islam," he said. "We are at war with people who have perverted Islam."

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