Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Tuesday he gets the impression at times that President Obama is “so defensive” about the reputation of Islam that Mr. Obama forgets his primary responsibility is to safeguard Americans.
“If the Episcopalians were the ones who were wreaking havoc and raping women indiscriminately, cutting people’s heads off, I think we’d say, ’we’d better be careful with these Methodists until we check ’em out to find out are they radical Methodists [or] are they normal Methodists?” Mr. Huckabee said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“But that’s not what we’re dealing with,” he said. “We have a responsibility to protect the American people — number one job of the president is protect America, not protect [the] reputation of Islam. And sometimes I get the impression that the president is so defensive about the reputation of Islam he forgets that his number one job as commander in chief is protect this country and eradicate those who are trying to kill us.”
Mr. Huckabee, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate said even a small risk of terrorists infiltrating the ranks of refugees is too great for the U.S. to take.
“Is the best way to help that five-year-old refugee to bring him to America, 8,000 miles away, on a ship or a plane that might contain some people who are coming here under the auspices of refugees but they’re actually [Islamic State] terrorists who are just waiting for the opportunity to kill us?” Mr. Huckabee said.
“Let me ask you this: if you bought a five-pound bag of peanuts and you knew that in the five-pound bag of peanuts there were about 10 peanuts that were deadly poisonous, would you feed them to your kids?” he said. “The answer is no. So if we’re [going to] help these refugees, why don’t we do it in an area closer to where they are being refugees from?”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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