Michael McCaul Quotes

There are very few fighters in the ISIS organization in Iraq and Syria coming from the United States; most of them have either come from a region of the Middle East or from Europe.

What I'm concerned about are two things. I think one that John Miller talked about, and that's the radicalization over the Internet that ISIS is very adept at doing. The other one is a foreign fighter threat.

I worry a bit about the unknowns when it comes to travelers to the war zones in Syria and Iraq. Who don't I see? And I worry about the people who may be in their basements radicalizing that I can't see.

ISIL presents a growing threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and now in the United States as well. Terrorists and their enablers will continue to receive the unwavering attention of law enforcement and the intelligence community.

It is changing the face of terrorism. It is basically bringing it to the United States, to our great citizens. We know the terrorists are barbaric and murderers that attack innocent civilians, as they did in this case.

It is a warning to all those who may think about becoming involved with a terrorist network, people who are willing to destroy their own lives are hard to deter.

Some of the people involved in ISIS are going to Iraq, and some of our young people are being radicalised through the Internet.

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

Muslim nations provide recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration.

I think it's important to note that after the airstrikes began in Iraq and Syria, ISIS began a very aggressive social media campaign calling for these types of attacks, these lone wolf attacks.

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.

When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.

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

It's safe to assume none of us actually wants to see ISIS-inspired terrorists armed with semi-automatic rifles, able to attack at will within our own borders.

The overall feckless strategy against ISIS in Syria and Iraq enabled the Islamist organization to expand its domain and drive out more religious minorities.

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.

Terrorists in ungoverned spaces - both physical and cyber - readily disseminate propaganda and training materials to attract easily influenced individuals around the world to their cause. They motivate these individuals to act at home or encourage them to travel.

ISIS is a threat to all civilized nations. America's intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We're not going to allow them to do so. We're going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate.

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.

There is no doubt ISIS poses a clear, direct threat to the United States, and decisive action is badly needed.

Nevertheless, I do know that we are part of a danger zone, we have military operations in Afghanistan and we're training the Iraqi police force. The terrorists also have us in their sights.

The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens - raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.

The scale of the ISIS threat is not yet matched by a clarity of approach for securing their defeat.

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.