After the Orlando shooting, Donald Trump said “we have to really increase the bombing” — he declined to say where — and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said the Islamic State group “must be destroyed” by all means “humanly possible," calls that come despite the fact the shooter was a U.S. citizen not known to have any real ties to the terrorist organization.
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In his first interview after the attack on "Fox and Friends," Trump advocated a kind of blitzkrieg in an unspecified Muslim region, saying, “We have to be furious for a short period of time.”
He reiterated his call for a ban on all Syrians but said that Muslims in the United States must also be more closely watched, beyond surveilling mosques.
While some have cast him as a critic of U.S. wars, Trump has time and again advocated "bombing the hell out of" various Muslim-majority countries, in addition to calling for the killing of alleged terrorists' families.
Trump did not specify what kind of military action he would advocate or where on Monday, but focused on President Barack Obama’s own war policy. He said that “there’s something going on” when Obama does not call out radical Islamic terrorism as the culprit. Trump earlier promoted the conspiracy that Obama was not born in the U.S. and is possibly a secret Muslim.
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Responding to Trump’s comments, Hillary Clinton rejected Trump's call for her to make the attack in Orlando about Islam as a whole.
“I'm not going to demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion,” she said.
Clinton’s said the response to the attack should be a stepped up effort to take on the gun lobby. As a candidate, however, Clinton has received the most funding from weapons manufacturers.
In a brief statement Sunday night, Bernie Sanders said the Islamic State group "must be destroyed" and that “we have got to do everything humanly possible to prevent these kinds of tragedies from occurring again.”
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Sunday shooting, but the statement has yet to be confirmed. No operational ties between the shooter and the group have been established.
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