Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, said President Obama’s not going to France for a unity rally in the wake of last week’s attacks isn’t the biggest issue for him, but that there has been too much political correctness in discussing events like the Fort Hood shooting and overseas wars.
“In retrospect, he probably has to think, ’Well, I should have gone,’ but for a guy who gives the president a lot of criticism about policy things, to me that’s not the biggest thing that I’d like to see him do,” Mr. Cornyn, the Senate majority whip, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
A string of recent terrorist attacks in France left 17 people dead, including 12 killed at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Heads of state, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, marched at the event in Paris on Sunday.
Mr. Cornyn said that most Muslims believe what happened in Paris doesn’t represent their religion and represents “extremism” they don’t recognize as part of their religious doctrine.
“I do think we’ve had too much political correctness in calling things like the attack at Fort Hood, Major Nidal Hasan, workplace violence, calling what we’ve been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq overseas contingency operations — the first step to actually dealing with [the] problem is calling it what it is, and this is terrorism,” he said.
“We were worried about al Qaeda and what happened on 9-11, Osama bin Laden, and now as we’ve seen because of the Internet and because … radicalization has occurred in different ways in different parts of the country, so anywhere we have failed states, where we have power vacuums, al Qaeda and its affiliates are able to organize and even with just three people commit a lot of mayhem and murder,” he said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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