In the wake of Friday's deadly terror attacks in the French capital, Texas senator and 2016 hopeful Ted Cruz made another controversial statement regarding Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the US, saying it is insane to let Muslim Syrians into the country, as some of them are suspected ISIL militants.
"We can't roll the dice with the safety of Americans and bring in people for whom there is an unacceptable risk that they could be jihadists coming here to kill Americans," Cruz said. "We just saw in Paris what happens when a country allows [ISIL] terrorists to come in as refugees and the result can be a horrific loss of life."
Opening the borders for Christians is fine, though, the candidate declared. Dividing refugees by their religious beliefs would prevent the infiltration of terrorists into the US, he believes.
"There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror. If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation," Cruz told reporters, according to the Washington Post.
No "meaningful risk," eh?
We're not sure how he missed the memo, but it seems the senator hasn't read up on domestic extremism in his own country.
Back in July, former Tennessee congressional candidate and Christian minister Robert Doggart was charged for allegedly planning to set ablaze a mosque in upstate New York. According to the Daily Beast, in a message recorded by a wiretap, Doggart told Texas and South Carolina militia members that his group will "burn down" local mosques and schools.
"Our small group will soon be faced with the fight of our lives. We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God," he wrote on social media. "We shall be Warriors who inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace."
According to Daryl Johnson, the lead author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report on "Rightwing extremism" (later withdrawn by Secretary Janet Napolitano under pressure from conservatives in Congress), the US government is so obsessively focused on "jihadists" that it doesn't notice the rising threat posed by homegrown rightwing extremism. Johnson claimed in June that DHS had up to 100 analysts employed to evaluate homegrown Islamic extremism and only three people analyzing non-Islamic domestic extremism.
Despite the staggering figures, fellow Republicans have agreed with Cruz, including Jeb Bush, who said on CNN's State of the Union that America should "focus efforts…on the Christians that are being slaughtered."
