Denis McDonough Quotes

We’ve spent more time debating what to call extremism than we have discussing a long-term strategy for defeating it. If we don’t wrestle with the long-term, every four years a different president and a different foreign minister will be facing a different terror group with a different acronym.

It is time for President Obama to admit that - in this new age of peer-to-peer terror - we need a real strategy to combat radicalization at home and destroy extremist safe havens abroad.

The bottom line is this. When it comes to preventing violent extremism and terrorism in the United States, Muslim Americans are not part of the problem, you're part of the solution.

I think as we look at this problem of ISIS, it's more than just an army. It's also a fight about ideas. And we have got to dry up their recruiting. We have got to dry up their fundraising. The way we intend to do it is to humiliate them, to divorce them from any nation giving them protection, and humiliating their message of hatred, of violence. Anyone who kills women and children is not devout. They have - they cannot dress themselves up in false religious garb and say that somehow this message has dignity.

Law enforcement does counter political extremism here in the United States in the exact same way that they do political extremists who are infiltrated into the United States, who may come from a religious motivation, as we saw overseas in Europe. But the same methodologies have to be used.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

I think the important thing to remember here is that we haven't been attacked again at home since September of 2001.

We must maximize our efforts to counter violent extremism, radicalization and recruitment in the United States and stop using xenophobia and ethnic stereotyping.

I believe, based on the activities, and I am not an expert on terrorism by any stretch, but I believe that when they attacked the United States and they attacked New York and Washington, D.C., they thought they could defeat us.

In some ways, September 11, 2001, seems a long time ago. Yet we have done so much in only a few years, and we will continue to do so in the future, to prevent such attacks on America.

It's very difficult to tell someone how to protect themselves from a terrorist attack, whether it occurs in the U.S. or on foreign soil, particularly when you have terrorists with no concern for human life.

I know the pain of having to deal with terrorism. And that's why, after 9-11, I was one of the first to join the international coalition to fight terrorism.

But as I often say, terrorists won't check our party registration before they blow us up.

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.

Al-Qa’ida members -- including some who are US citizens --have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

The Internet has made it easier for those who want to attack the American way of life to identify like-minded individuals to carry out their terroristic plans

The threat from terrorists - from extreme ideologies - needs to be challenged head-on.

Social media campaigns and the savviness of ISIS and propaganda is what greatly concerns us Homeland Security officials.

You have to keep on disrupting. If you let up the pressure, then al-Qaeda senior leadership will come back.

I think the effective thing is, I passed this bill to combat violent extremism in the United States as effective outreach to the Muslim community, so you can pull the religious leaders really on to our team, if you will, to protect us from radicalization from within those communities.

I think, in the wake of Sept. 11, it's important for the American public to understand that to the extent that there are individuals within the United States who would undertake terrorist attacks, that we are doing something to address that.

We have to make sure we control who enters our country. And we have to sustain and increase our efforts to fight the terrorists at their source, both on the ground and in the battle for hearts and minds.

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

We think there should be a better countering-violent-extremism effort, that there should be a lead agency tasked to handle that.

Since the beginning of the Bush administration when we were attacked, September 11th, we've not had any major terrorist attack in this country. We've had individual crazy people, of normally, they look more like me than they look like Middle Easterners.