Cruz said Sunday that only Christian refugees from Syria should be admitted to the United States.
Advertisement
The political benefits of this are obvious; you get to simultaneously make irrationally panicked people feel like you’ve got their safety at heart, pander to the “good” Christian people in your base by identifying them as the good guy, while also pandering to the Pamela Geller types who hate Muslims even more than they love Jesus.
The American people are compassionate but they are not stupid, nor are they suicidal. “We don’t add religious tests to our compassion”, he said.
The Washington Post noted that Obama was alluding to Sen. Ted Cruz said preference should be given to Syrian Christians.
“Obama facing enormous opposition in accepting refugees”.
“We should not be admitting either Muslims or Christians, and you’ll say, ‘Whoa why won’t you want to admit Christians?’, because in so doing we would be accomplishing exactly what ISIS wants to accomplish, which is to rid the area of Christians, which is to rid the area of moderate Muslims”, Santorum said on Pittsburgh radio show “Rose Unplugged”, according to an audio clip highlighted by Buzzfeed News. “We should focus our efforts as it relates to the Christians that are being slaughtered”, he said.
“It’s not surprising that President Obama is attacking me personally”, Cruz said.
There’s a solid case to be made against Obama’s handling of the Islamic State that doesn’t require Republicans to go nativist. “And that is never more true than with radical Islamic terrorism”, said Cruz. “Both President Obama and Hillary Clinton want to define the enemy as a few sort of abstract and ill-defined violent extremism. That means they can not direct a strategy to defeat it because they can not acknowledge who they’re fighting”. He reiterated his assertion that it is “lunacy” to allow Muslim refugees into the United States, asserting that there is no way to know if they are aligned with the Islamic State.
Map showing the journey to Europe of one of the suspect in Friday’s attacks in Paris. At least one of the ISIS perpetrators apparently entered Europe as a “refugee” from Syria – he was found with a refugee ID.
Obama announced in September that the USA would raise the number of refugees it accepts for settlement next year, including 10,000 from Syria.
Rejecting the refugees, said Obama, would be a betrayal of American values.
“Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values”, he said.
In recent days, a number of lawmakers have called on the Obama administration to halt those plans citing security concerns following the Paris attacks.
The Texas Republican often mentions how his father fled Cuba for the United States as a young man. Cruz was asked on CNN on Monday how he could bar refugees from the United States given his father’s story. We will not turn our backs on the refugees who are fleeing Syria and Afghanistan. In the same way that the Muslim community has an obligation not to in any way excuse anti-Western or anti-Christian sentiment, we have the same obligation as Christians.
Cruz plans to introduce legislation in the Senate this week to cut off federal funding for refugee resettlement, allying himself with Ben Carson, perhaps Cruz’s closest competitor in the presidential race.
Advertisement
Do you think the US should accept Syrian refugees?
