Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Saturday slammed President Barack Obama's words on how the United States would respond to the brutal beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State as "insufficient, naïve, and just plain weak."
"I understand that the president of the United States should not be prone to wild rhetoric," Jindal said in an
opinion piece for Fox News. "But this is ridiculous."
In his remarks Wednesday about Foley's death,
Obama called ISIS a "cancer" that must be eliminated and vowed that America would do what it must to protect its citizens."
Foley, 40, of Rochester, N.H., was kidnapped on Nov. 22, 2012, in northern Syria. He had earlier been kidnapped and released in Libya.
ISIS posted a video of his beheading on the Internet.
"Jim was taken from us in an act of violence that shocked the conscience of the entire world," Obama said in Edgartown, Mass., near where he was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard.
"The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people. We will be vigilant and we will be relentless," the president said. "When people harm Americans, anywhere, we do what's necessary to see that justice is done."
In his Fox piece, Jindal complimented Obama's "very eloquent" words but attacked them on several fronts. The Republican governor is considering a run for the White House in 2016.
"The president said that when people harm Americans, 'we do what's necessary to see that justice is done and we act against ISIL, standing alongside others.' "
"What?" Jindal asked. "Here's an idea: How about we offer these people death instead of justice?"
"'Justice' generally conjures up images of a courtroom with a government-provided defense attorney," he continued. "Here's another way the president could phrase it: 'We will hunt them down and kill them.'"
"And as for the president's phrase 'standing alongside others,' what does that mean? We should hunt and kill the people who did this completely, regardless of who stands with us," Jindal said.
In response to Obama saying that the Iraqi people "must continue coming together to expel these terrorists from their community," the governor said: "Um, no. They do not need to be expelled. They need to be eliminated."
He added that these were Obama's most-important words: "People like this ultimately fail. They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy."
However, "it's a lie, a lie that could only be believed by a person who never took a history class," Jindal said.
"We have a president who is disturbingly naïve and holds a dangerous utopian view of the world and the dangers therein," he continued, noting that Obama described ISIS earlier this year as a "junior varsity" team that was not on par with al-Qaida.
"For him now to assert, 'people like this ultimately fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy,' is flat-out absurd," Jindal said.
"The truth is, these people will only fail if we cause them to fail. It is not inevitable. Causing them to fail requires that they be defeated, destroyed, and yes, killed.
"In World War II we did not win the future by building, we won it by destroying," Jindal concluded. "The murderous fools who cut the heads off of Americans must be destroyed, and sent to their reward, such as it is, in the next life."
The terrorist group also has several other American hostages, including another journalist, Steven Sotloff, 31, who appeared at the end of the Foley video. Sotloff, who was raised in Miami, went missing in northern Syria while reporting in July 2013.
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