Martin E. Dempsey Quotes

Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause.

ISIL does something al-Qaida would never imagine: they test people by tasking them.

The Islamic State has proven that terrorists can seize and deploy modern military equipment on lesser-armed opponents.

ISIL particularly is very slick, very sophisticated, proselytizing and recruiting, and they are very astute users of social media.

We can put a stake through the heart of Islamic State as an army. We can put a stake through the heart of its leaders. You can take away its territory. But you can't put a stake through the heart of the ideas, of the ideology, that sadly, tragically, still has some attraction for some small numbers in the Islamic faith.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.

For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.

Throughout the world, terrorists are actively seeking their next recruit. Alarmingly, terrorist organizations are increasingly targeting school-age children as the next generation of terrorists.

Come to the so-called caliphate and live the life of some sort of glory ...; and if you can't come, kill somebody where you are; kill somebody in uniform; kill anybody; if you can cut their head off, great; videotape it; do it; do it; do it.... Kill, kill, kill.

Terrorists

Of course, Islamist terrorists must be captured or killed and their networks disrupted. But to stop their movement’s growth, their ideology must also be undermined.

Terrorism is a means/a tactic, not an ideological or defined physical enemy

We have about 200,000 ISIS tweets per day that hit the United States. The chatter is so loud and the volume is so high that it's a problem that's very hard to stop and disrupt in this country.

I think ISIS is achieving the objectives that they have set out to achieve. I think that they feel probably very emboldened. They feel pretty good. Their resiliency is extraordinary.

Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.

I believe it is actually fomenting the growth of ISIL; Donald Trump could be a recruitment poster for ISIL because he is fanning the flames of hate.

We're dealing with an enemy now, ISIS, that has a very sophisticated social media program.

ISIS has leadership, just like al Qaeda has leadership. It's important to be able to eliminate the individuals that are leading the organization.

When mainstream Muslims defeat the Islamic State, that lessens the ability of the Islamic State to recruit and fund-raise.

One of the scariest things about ISIS is their ability to leverage social media to inspire individuals who have never been to Syria and Iraq.

We will continue to work around the world to beat ISIS about where they may exist, these are horrible ideologies or murderous ideologies.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

ISIS is an idea. And we have to fight this idea with the same tools that they're using.

The survival of ISIS's ideology is success enough for them. We must spare no effort in denying ISIS this success.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.