Robert Jeffress: Obama Would Be Criticizing Christians If a Conservative Carried Out Orlando Massacre
Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas has called out President Barack Obama for defending Muslims following the Orlando massacre where 49 people were killed at a gay nightclub, and said the rhetoric would be very different if a Christian conservative had carried it out.
"If this had been a conservative Christian who committed this horrific act, this is all Barack Obama would be talking about — how Christians needs to rethink their faith and reform their views. But he is silent about that when it comes to radical Islam," Jeffress alleged on Fox Business' "Varney & Co." on on Wednesday.
Orlando shooter Omar Mateen pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State terror group before carrying out the shooting, and according to sources close to the investigation he made social media posts vowing that his actions would serve as revenge for U.S. airstrikes against IS targets.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Obama has repeatedly refused to use the phrase "radical Islam" in his speeches, and has denounced presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's policy of halting Muslim immigration into the U.S> until better security measures are put in place.
"We've gone through moments in our history before when we acted out of fear and we came to regret it," Obama said on Tuesday. "We've seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens and it has been a shameful part of our history."
"Where does this stop?" the president asked. "Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? ... Do Republican officials actually agree with this?"
He further stated that the phrase "radical Islam" is not a "magic" word that will solve the problem.
Jeffress insisted, however, that Obama spends too much time in his "favorite role" of "defender-in-chief for Islam."
"It's important for this president to acknowledge that whether we are talking about Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, or now Orlando, these attacks were not committed by militant Methodists, they were committed by militant Muslims. That is not racism, that is realism, and it's a realism this president better start acknowledging," the pastor warned.
He further insisted that it is not possible to defeat an enemy that has not been properly identified.
"We all acknowledge that most Muslims are peace-loving. The most conservative estimate is that only 5 percent of Muslims have embraced radical Islam. But out of 1.5 billion Muslims, that's 75 million Muslims who embrace radical Islam," he suggested.
Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has suggested that political correctness failed America in this attack, as news has come out that Mateen was questioned twice by FBI over terror-links in 2013 and 2014, but was never arrested.
Mateen had reportedly told co-workers that his family had connections to other terror groups, such as al-Qaeda, and had even expressed wishes to die as a martyr.
"So why in the world did they drop the investigation and walk away after 10 months? They bought his claim that he was teasing his co-workers because he thought they were trying to marginalize him for his Muslim faith," Huckabee wrote on Tuesday.
"In other words, they were more willing to believe that all his American co-workers were bigots than that he might be a danger to society. He'd learned to speak the language of political correctness well and used it to manipulate guilty liberals."
