Western Iowa Congressman Steve King says al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists around the globe will be "dancing in the streets" if Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is elected president.
"I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name, whatever the religion of their father might have been. I’ll just say this, that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected president of the United States, I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does this look like to the world of Islam?" King said Friday during an interview in KICD studios in Spencer. "And I will tell you that if he is elected president, then the radical islamists, the al Qaida and the radical Islamists and their supporters Will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11th."
King, a Republican from Kiron, endorsed GOP candidate Fred Thompson before the Iowa Caucuses. He now supports the party’s presumptive nominee, John McCain. A spokesman for Obama’s campaign During the interview in Spencer, King attacked Obama’s promise to pull American troops out of Iraq and questioned the impact Obama’s heritage might have on the rest of the world. Obama’s father was Kenyan and Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
"It does matter. His middle name does matter. It matters because they read meaning into that and the rest of the world, it has special meaning to them. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict. So there are implications that have to do with who he is and the positions that he has taken.
"If he were strong on national defense and said, ‘I’m going to go over there and we’re going to fight and we’re going to win. We’ll come home with a victory,’ that’s different, but that’s not what he’s said.
"There will be dancing in the streets if he’s elected president and that has a chilling effect on how difficult it will be to ever win this global war on terror," King said.
A spokesman for Obama has called upon McCain to denounce King’s remarks. Nearly two years ago King himself called long-time White House reporter Helen Thomas and offered her his personal apology for a joke he told at the 2006 Republican Party of Iowa state convention about the recent death of a top al Qaeda operative.
"He’s probably the most evil terrorist on the planet. He killed women and babies. He stopped buses and sorted out Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and saved the Sunnis and executed the Shiites and the Kurds. He would use family menbers as human bombs after he killed them to put explosives inside them and when the families came to recover (the body) he would detonate that. This man is full of hatred and he was always looking for another way to go to a deeper depth and so I’ll contend that’s where he is today," King said, to applause from the Republican delegates. "And what occured to me that morning is something that I imagine a lot of you have thought about and he’s probably figured it out by now. There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at and if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas."
Click on the audio link below to listen to the two sections of King’s Friday appearance on KICD Radio.
