Giuliani: Trump is right, Obama is showing weakness

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, one of the many supporters of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, criticized President Barack Obama in an interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper on the weekend.

In the interview, Giuliani said he agreed with Trump’s stance that Obama shows weakness and warned that this weakness will lead to more terrorist attacks against America.

“The shooting in Orlando was an act of Islamic extremist terrorism. In this particular case it was focused on a gay club. The tape that we have now heard makes his motive clear. His motive was to act on behalf of the Islamic State,” he said.

“So you add this to what is now a growing list of attacks in less than a year — San Bernardino was in December, and then we had Brussels and then Paris and now Orlando. We are getting more terrorist attacks than we’ve ever had before, and I attribute that to something that I predicted: I said that the more America withdraws, the more weakness America shows, the more they will attack,” he warned.

The “weakness” shown by the administration, said the former New York Mayor, is illustrated by the “withdrawal from Iraq, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the withdrawal of police officers from mosques, the failure of the president to use the term ‘Islamic extremist terrorism,’ these are all very bad signals to give to terrorists. The more they see weakness, the more they attack.”

Asked if he agrees with Trump’s suggestion of racial profiling of Muslims, Giuliani said that racial profiling is required but not in the sense of discriminatory profiling.

The United States “does need profiling based on the characteristics of suspected murderers, suspected terrorists. You can’t investigate everyone, and law enforcement is constantly profiling. You have to make a distinction between profiling based purely on race, religion, ethnic background or gender, and profiling based on facts,” he added.

“If I’m looking for a serial killer who is 5 foot 4 with dark hair and I’m told that he is Italian-American, I don’t go looking for Irish Americans or black people, I go looking for Italians who are 5 foot 4. When I went after the mafia, you could say that I ethnically profiled Italians. Well, why did I do that? Because to be a member of the mafia, you had to be Italian,” said Giuliani.

“So to say that we are going to have more scrutiny of people belonging to the Islamic religion coming in from certain countries who are planning to kill us is only common sense. We just have to be aware of the fact that obviously not all members of the Islamic religion are terrorists — it would be terrible to suggest that — but it is true that most terrorists are in fact members of the Islamic religion. If you didn’t pay special attention to that, you wouldn’t be protecting the American people. So all this depends on how you define racial profiling,” he told Israel Hayom.

Giuliani was also asked why he thinks Obama has refused to utter the words “radical Islam” in relation to the Orlando shooting, a fact which has resulted in criticism for Trump.

“You’d have to ask him. I don’t know what he thinks he is accomplishing,” said Giuliani, but also added, “Everybody knows that it was Islamic extremist terrorism. He wouldn’t be telling us anything we don’t know. In this particular case, the killer himself told us.”

“I think it is stubbornness, not to say Islamic extremist terrorism,” he continued. “Not only that, but they take the words out. I think the French president used those words in a conference several weeks ago and the State Department took the words out of his mouth. That’s absurd, that kind of censorship.”

“When the Justice Department released transcripts of the police call made by Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, they were going to omit all the references to Islamic terrorism and Mateen’s pledge of loyalty to the Islamic State. That was the first decision made by the White House and the Justice Department, until many many people complained and they finally had to put it out,” said Giuliani.

“I don’t know what they think they’re accomplishing. I actually think they’re making it worse. They should just put out the facts. Instead, they hold the facts back and it only gets more attention.”

The former New York Mayor also said that Trump is “absolutely right that President Obama has been extremely weak in dealing with Islamic extremist terrorism.”

“The Islamic State would not exist in the form that it is currently in had President Obama not withdrawn from Iraq, and had President Obama intervened in Syria. Yes, it existed before he came into office, but it was a very small group,” added Giuliani.

“When we abandoned Iraq and left it to [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki, a Shiite and, I believe, a puppet of Iran, he started killing the Sunnis. They had nowhere to go. So the good Sunnis went and hid at home and the bad ones joined ISIS. Had we had troops there, that would not have happened,” he said.

“”Secondly, if we had troops there, we would have found out about it when it first started. Remember when Obama referred to Islamic State as JV? That was poor intelligence. And why did we have poor intelligence? Because Obama pulled the troops out.”

“Finally, he created this whole refugee crisis because he refused to set up a no-fly zone in Syria. He had been asked to do that by a number of senators, as well as the president of France, but he didn’t do it. He threatened [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad with attack 12 different times if he used chemical weapons and backed down all 12 times. And he brought [Russian President Vladimir] Putin back into the Middle East. So I think that when Trump says that ISIS, in its present form, was created by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, I think he is right,” said Giuliani.