Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that he was “stunned” President Obama mentioned last month’s police shooting in Ferguson, Mo. in the same breath as the conflict in the Middle East during his United Nations speech.
“I was stunned,” Cheney told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “In one case, you’ve got a police officer involved in a shooting … there’s no comparison to that, with what ISIS is doing to thousands of people throughout the Middle East with bloody beheadings of anybody they come in contact with.”
Speaking earlier in the day before the U.N. General Assembly, Obama vowed to lead a coalition to combat the Islamic State’s “network of death.” He also referenced the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white Ferguson police officer after urging other nations and religious groups to reject violent extremism.
“I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals, that America has plenty of problems within our own borders,” Obama said, as quoted by USA Today. “This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”
“So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions,” he added, as quoted by USA Today. “And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear.”
Cheney thought Obama was falsely comparing the United States’ racial tensions with the struggle to combat extremism in the Middle East.
“I mean, to compare the two as though somehow there is moral equivalence there is I think outrageous,” he told Hannity.
