During a press briefing on Wednesday, deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf condemned the beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamic terrorists while adding that the threat posed by the terror group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) “is not about the United States and what we do.”

That comment led Associated Press reporter Matt Lee to ask if President Barack Obama's speech the day before -- in which he called for “a common effort to extract this cancer so that it does not spread” --  was a sign that “you’re actually going to do something” about terrorism.