Beji Caid Essebsi Quotes

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

I think a lot of programs, policies have been put in place since 9/11, have prevented a 9/11-style attack. On the other hand, I think the threat has become greater, not lesser.

I am committed to protecting our country against the threat of terrorism.

You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.

There's no national strategy to deal with combating terrorism and foreign fighters.

How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS?

We want to go further than preventing people from becoming terrorists and focus on a broader approach to counter-extremism - both violent and non-violent.

The goal of isolating extremists and making them unwelcome in Muslim communities has been abandoned.

With awareness and a social movement against extremism, we can prevent our children from becoming terrorists.

Simply killing everyone who is already a terrorist today won't solve the problem.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

There is no priority higher than the prevention of terrorism.

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

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.

Look, we constantly live looking at the issue of the threat of terrorism.

I think these Al-Qaida terrorists need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings

What do they want us to do? Kiss them [suspected terrorists] on both cheeks.... The report is full of crap.

The hard reality is that attacks by vehicles in public places are very hard to defend against in a free and open society. The best defense against such attacks is good intelligence, and that often comes from inside the Muslim community.

The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police work, which has been successful worldwide.

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.

The homegrown terrorists are the most significant because any fighter returning from Syria to the United States would likely be identified and detected by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

As a former undercover CIA officer, I've worked with my colleagues in the 114th Congress to approach the growing terrorist threat from a number of angles, including addressing the issue of terrorists' ease of travel, combating terrorist recruitment strategies, and improving our own counterterrorism capabilities.

Counterterrorism, cyberterrorism, it's real.

Here's what we should be doing. We should be monitoring every mosque. We should be monitoring social media. We've got about three million Muslims in the United States.

In 2001, terrorism was fought in a completely different way.