WASHINGTON
Use of the term “radical Islam” to describe the events that led to 17 deaths in France last week would be inaccurate, the White House said Tuesday.
“We want to describe exactly happened,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters when explaining why the administration has shied from using the term. “These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it.”
"What we should do is we should call it what it is. And it's an act of terror. And it's one that we roundly condemn," he said.
Twelve people were killed inside the Paris headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo when gunmen entered and began their rampage last Wednesday.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, the suspects in the attack, were killed Jan. 9 in a warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goele, a small town north of Paris.
On the same day, four hostages and a gunman - linked to the Kouachi brothers and, said to have been involved in the murder of a policewoman Jan. 8 - were killed inside a kosher supermarket in Paris.
Earnest said that the administration doesn’t “want to be in a situation where we are legitimizing what we consider to be a completely illegitimate justification for this act of terrorism.”
