Kerry: There’s Been a ‘Silly Debate’ in the Media Recently About How To Fight ISIS

“What everyone's individual experience might be, there are no grounds of history, religion, ideology, psychology, politics or economic disadvantage or personal ambition that will ever justify the killing of children, the kidnapping or rape of teenage girls or the slaughter of unarmed civilians. These atrocities cannot be rationalized, they cannot be excused, they must be opposed, and they must be stopped ... 

Our challenge then is not really one of marshaling facts, because the facts are wholly on our side. Our task is to encourage the most credible leaders and spokespersons to penetrate the barrier of terrorist lies and to do so over and over and over again. We have to support the right people saying the right things all the time … 

There's been a silly debate in the media in the last days about sort of what you have to do. You have to do everything. You have to take the people off the battlefield who are there today, but you're kind of stupid if all you do is do that ask you don't prevent more people from going to the battlefield. So we have a broad challenge here. And mostly it is to talk about facts and realities and to take those realities and put them into a real strategy that we all implement together. 

No one country, no one army, no one group is going to be able to respond to this adequately. And we see that in the numbers of countries that are now being touched by it.”