In an address at the State Department on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry wanted to make sure that everyone understood that Islam does not cause extremism, but deprivation and “climate change” do.
Kerry appeared at a reception at the State Department in honor of the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha and thought it was important to set the record straight that groups like ISIS aren’t really driven by Islam but by poverty, youthful populations, and climate change.
“The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions,” Kerry claimed. “There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for or is doing to people.”
In fact, Kerry proclaimed that ISIS is only rampaging across Syria and Iraq because they are young people who are just jealous of what people have in The West.
“We’re living at a point in time where there are just more young people demanding what they see the rest of the world having than at any time in modern history,” he lectured.
Kerry went on to say that the world needs to work together for the “sustainability of the planet itself,” bringing him to one of his favorite topics: climate change.
“And that brings us to something like climate change, which is profoundly having an impact in various parts of the world, where droughts are occurring not at a 100-year level but at a 500-year level in places that they haven’t occurred, floods of massive proportions, diminishment of water for crops and agriculture at a time where we need to be talking about sustainable food.”
Climate change, Kerry insisted, has brought “farmers” into “deadly conflict” in Africa.
“These are our challenges,” he said.
