Vice President Joe Biden was scheduled to leave Los Angeles Tuesday morning after telling reporters at a public event that the terrorist organization ISIS “will not prevail.”
Biden made the ISIS remarks in light of the attacks in Paris as he took part in a clean-technology economic development discussion in Los Angeles.
Prior to a roundtable discussion at the L.A. Cleantech Incubator, which was founded in 2011 to serve as the hub of the city’s economic strategy to create a green economy and become less dependent on “foreign fuels,” Biden said ISIS “offers nothing but destruction” and a “twisted ideology that is not sustainable.”
He said the United States “will not yield” in its fight against the organization, and its defeat is “inevitable.”
“We will prevail. ISIS will not prevail,” Biden said in his remarks Monday.
Biden also took issue with people who are calling for a closing of borders in response to the Paris shootings that left 129 people dead. In apparent reference to some U.S. governors who said they do not want to accept Syrian refugees in their states — fearing that terrorists might use the refugee crisis as a way to sneak across borders — Biden said the nation needs to resist the tendency to close borders.
“The moment we give in and change anything about the openness of our society is the moment they win,” he said. “And we cannot let that happen.”
More than 180 Syrian refugees have come to California over the past year, and hundreds more are expected this year. Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday he does not want to close the state to refugees, but will work with the White House to ensure refugees are “fully vetted.”
Mayor Eric Garcetti was among the dignitaries joining Biden at the event. Biden praised the work being done at the Incubator, saying it “brings together innovative minds with the courage to take a chance on a new idea.”
Biden is scheduled to attend a Democratic fundraiser tonight and spend the night in Los Angeles. He will leave the Southland Tuesday morning, bound for Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Houston, Texas.
—City News Service