Attorney Gen. Loretta Lynch said this week that "the most appropriate response to terror and hatred is love," but Sen. Ron Johnson said Wednesday he wishes it would be that easy.
"The only way you end a war, you either defeat the other side or both sides decide to lay down their arms," the Wisconsin Republican told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on the
"America's Newsroom" program. "That's not happening with Islamic terror."
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said that in a hearing on Tuesday, senators heard witnesses testify about the barbarity of ISIS, and the testimony was hard to hear.
"We had a young Yazidi woman come and describe her enslavement and her rape," he told MacCallum. "What we have to do to defeat Islamic terror is to destroy them. We have to destroy Islamic terrorists wherever we find them on the planet and defeat them. People do love peace. But that's not ISIS' profile. I don't know why they do what they do, but they are doing it and it has to be stopped."
Denying the "reality of ISIS" will make the violence continue, said Johnson.
"There have been 1,191 terror-related deaths, ISIS-inspired deaths since 2015," the senator said.
"We'll see tragedy after tragedy unless we start attacking the root cause. ISIS has a territory and a caliphate. As long as they exist they will continue to be perceived as winners. This administration is not based on that reality."
And America will need to lead if there is to be any hope of finding terrorists and stopping them, he continued.
Omar Mateen, the man who shot and killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub and injured dozens of others, was on two terror watch lists, the senator told MacCallum, but he was still able to go into a store and attempt to buy body armor and ammunition in bulk, and was speaking in a foreign language on his cell phone.
"We'll find out what we could have done that would have prevented that particular terrorist attack, [and] take a look at where essentially political correctness prevented people from reporting things or prevented our law enforcement officials from taking the actions that could have prevented these."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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