President Obama, In a press conference following the G-20 meeting in Turkey, addressed the attacks in Paris and national security, saying that the U.S. and other nations must "welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety." "Slamming the door in their faces," he said, "would be a betrayal of our values."
He said that all the nations at the summit "have sent an unmistakable message—we are united against this threat," and that all of the participants "committed to strengthening border controls, sharing more information and stepping up our efforts." In four separate questions from U.S. reporters, he was asked a variation on the theme of didn't he underestimate the ISIS threat and shouldn't he change strategy, and forcefully answered each by detailing the military strategy his administration is following to shrink the territory ISIS occupies, explaining the process by which we gather and share intelligence and challenging his critics to come up with a new answer beyond committing troops.
We have to recognize, Obama said, that "this is not conventional warfare. We play into the ISIL narrative when we act as if they're a state." He challenged his critics, and implicitly all of the Republican presidential candidates, to come up with a strategy that is not dependent upon putting tens of thousands of troops overseas. "What I do not do," he said, "is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow in the abstract make America look tough, or make me look tough." That's because, he said, "every few months I go to Walter Reed and I see a 25 year old kid who's paralyzed or has lost his limbs and some of those are people I've ordered into battle. So I can't afford to play some of the political games that other play."
President Obama distinguished the small number of radical terrorists who say they are acting in the name of Islam, and the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing strife, poverty, and famine, pointing that the "overwhelming majority of victims are themselves Muslim." He went on to say that ISIL does not represent Islam and doesn't represent the majority of Muslims. Addressing specifically the debate that has "popped up" at home over the weekend, he said that we cannot equate the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism. "When I hear folks say that maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims, when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution? That's shameful. That's not American. That's not who we are. We don't have religious tests to our compassion."
He concluded that he was very proud after 9/11, when President Bush was "adamant and clear" that this is not a war on Islam, and the current leaders of his party are ignoring all that, "that's not who we are. On this they should follow his example. […] The values that we are defending, the values that we are fighting against ISIL for, are precisely that we don't discriminate against people because of their faith. We don't kill people because they're different than us. That's what separates us from them. We don't feed that kind of notion that somehow Christians and Muslims are at war."