President Barack Obama called yesterday for the Muslim world to embark on a “generational task” of confronting the “cancer of violent extremism” in a sharply worded speech at the UN.
Speaking two days after he ordered the first US air strikes against Islamist militants in Syria, Mr Obama challenged other countries in the Middle East – including US allies – to do more to dismantle the extremist group Isis’s “network of death”.
Mr Obama framed the struggle against the Isis in the stark moral terms that he has often been reluctant to use. “There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil,” he said at the UN general assembly. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”