Earnest: Muslim Leaders Need To Talk About How Islam Is a ‘Peaceful Religion’

"This violent extremism is something that the world has been dealing with for more than a decade now. We obviously are trying to monitor what we consider to be, you know, a really important threat, which is this threat of foreign fighters. So, you know, it is clear that ISIL does harbor the ambition to try and radicalize people all across the globe and one core component of our strategy has been to mobilize the forces or the leaders in the Muslim community, particularly the moderate voices in the Muslim community to talk about what the values of Islam really are. It's a peaceful religion and it’s terrible that we are seeing some radical extremists attempt to use some of the values [indecipherable] to that religion and distort them greatly and inspire people to commit terrible acts of violence.

Again, I don’t want to get ahead of this situation. It’s still under investigation. We don’t know exactly what happened yet. It is still not clear who is responsible and what their motivations were but we are very cognizant of this threat that's posed by foreign fighters, that's posed by ISIL's attempts to use social media in a rather sophisticated way to try to inspire people around a globe to commit other acts of violence and that's something that we work very closely with our allies on a daily basis to combat."