Newt Gingrich said the United States needs to have a conversation about American citizens who could be potential terrorists. | AP Photo Newt slams Obama's 'attitude'

Newt Gingrich responded Tuesday to President Barack Obama's fierce denunciation of the rhetoric employed by his party's presumptive nominee on Tuesday, reupping his call for a congressional commission to investigate what he terms "Islamic supremacism and terrorism in the United States."

“The president does America and the West a great disservice by suggesting that accurately describing Islamic supremacists means we have to be at war with Islam. That’s not true," the former speaker of the House said during a livestream on his Facebook page, after Obama ripped into Republicans and Donald Trump in particular for castigating him on his failure to use the term "radical Islam" or some variant.


Gingrich — who ranks among Trump's most ardent defenders — continued, "If you’re a modern Muslim, if you’re willing to accept diversity, if you’re willing to accept the rule of secular law, if you’re willing to live in peace with your neighbors, we have no problem with you, if you’re a modern Muslim."

"But, if you believe in sharia, and genuinely believe in it, if you think that gays and lesbians ought to be killed, if you think that Christians and Jews and Baha’i and others ought to either submit or be killed, we have a lot of disagreement. If you want to support terrorist movements with money, with recruitment, with propaganda, then you’re our enemy," Gingrich continued. "And the president doesn’t come to grips with this.”

What Obama and the U.S. should not do is make it harder to catch potential terrorists, Gingrich suggested. The U.S. should have two different conversations, he argued: one about the immigrants seeking asylum in the country and others who are already American citizens.

"We can no more afford to have fanatic terrorists at home just because they’re American citizens, be allowed to run around, get organized and kill people, than we can afford to bring in thousands of unvetted and unverified Syrian refugees," Gingrich said. "So I believe the president is profoundly, fundamentally wrong. I believe the Congress should create a commission on Islamic supremacism and terrorism in the United States. I think we should start looking at serious new laws.”

The Sunday morning shooting in Orlando, Florida, "was terrible," Gingrich continued.

"The terror that people must have felt, trapped in that nightclub as this enemy of America methodically killed people — it must have been awful. But down the road are more terrible things if we don’t start winning, if we don’t tell the truth, if we don’t learn to be honest about what faces us," Gingrich warned. "Down the road is a very real danger of systematic violence."

Urging any of his viewers "who want to be complacent" to read "Day of Wrath" by William Forstchen, a fictional account of ISIL terrorists massacring children in schools, Gingrich said there is a "very grave danger" awaiting the U.S. "down the road" should it not shift course.

"Down the road, there’s a very grave danger that sooner or later, these enemies of the West are going to find nuclear weapons and use them. So I think speak through a sense of genuine urgency, because I think this is a mortal threat to our country and certainly a mortal threat to thousands of Americans," Gingrich said. "And I’m saddened by the president’s attitude. He has had failure after failure. Failure in Libya. Failure in Yemen. Failure in Somalia. Failure in Syria. Failure in Iraq. Failure in Afghanistan. And here at home, he has established rules which make it virtually impossible for the FBI to do their job. The Congress ought to review it, make public what the problems are, we should fix them and we should do so before more Americans are killed because of ignorance, timidity and an unwillingness to face reality.”