Obama Condemns Journalist Beheading: ‘No Just God Would Stand For What They Do’

In a grim national address Wednesday, President Barack Obama mourned murdered U.S. journalist James Foley and condemned in harsh terms the Islamic terrorist group that killed him.

Obama said that he had spoken with the Foley family and told them that “we are all heartbroken at their loss and join them in honoring Jim in all that he did.”

“Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to the killers,” Obama said of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which released the video Tuesday of Foley’s beheading.

Speaking midday in Edgartown, Mass., where he is vacationing with his family, Obama denounced ISIS, which has terrorized areas of Syria and northern Iraq under its control and threatened Tuesday to kill another American journalist in captivity unless the U.S. military halted airstrikes against it, in some of his strongest language yet.

ISIS “speaks for no religion… No faith teaches people to massacre innocents,” Obama said. “No just god would stand for what they do every day. (ISIS) has no ideology of value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt.

“They may claim out of expediency they are at war with the United States or the West. The fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but endless slavery to their empty vision. The collapse of any definition of civilized behavior,” he continued. ” People like this ultimately fail. They fail because futures are won by those who build, not destroy, shaped by people like Jim Foley and overwhelming majority of humanity are appalled by those who killed him.”

Obama also pledged that the United States would “do what is necessary to see that justice is done.”

“There has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread. There has to be a clear rejection of the kind of a nihilistic ideologies. One thing we can all agree on is group like (ISIS) has no place in the 21st century,” he said. “Friends and allies around the world, we share a common security a set of values opposite of what we saw yesterday. We will continue to confront this hateful terrorism and replace it with a sense of hope and stability.”

“That is what Jim Foley stood for.”