Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
on Thursday night rejected any link between Islam and extremism practiced by the likes of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh), pointing instead to factors such as poverty among youthful Mideast populations, the Israeli-Paleostinian conflict ‐ and climate change.
Addressing a reception at the State Department in honor of the recent Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, Kerry told an audience of Moslem community representatives, diplomats and others that the world was facing "a very complex time, and there are many currents that are loose out there that have brought us to this moment."
"The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions," he said. "There's nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for, or is doing to people."
The situation was "complicated, and for other reasons," Kerry said. "We're living at a point in time where there are just more young people demanding what they see the rest of the world having than at any time in modern history."
He said with large youthful populations in some countries in the Middle East, South-Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, "you are going to have a governance problem unless your governance is really addressing the demands and needs of that part of the population."