Just wrong

Jeb Bush: Trump's idea to register Muslims 'just wrong'

By Nick Gass

Jeb Bush slammed prescriptions for combating Islamic terrorist threats like closing mosques and registering Muslims as "just wrong" on Friday, a week after Islamic State terrorists killed at least 129 people and injured hundreds more in a series of coordinated attacks across Paris.

"It’s not a question of toughness. It’s manipulating people's angst and their fears. That’s not strength. That’s weakness," Bush said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "And look, campaigns are important for sure. We’re electing a president, but there are things that are important as it relates to the values that we have as a country that make us special and unique, and we should not and we will never abandon them in the pursuit of this fight. We don't have to. We can protect our freedoms here."

Bush's comments come after one of his GOP rivals, Donald Trump, told Yahoo News he would not rule out creating a registry for Muslims in the United States.

“We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully," Trump said. Later in the day, he told NBC News that he "would certainly implement" a database system.

"There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases," he said. "We should have a lot of systems."

Asked to clarify the difference between that idea and what the Nazis did to register Jews in Germany, Trump told an NBC reporter “You tell me.”

But in another interview published Thursday night, Trump denied saying that Muslims would have to carry identification cards.

“I didn’t say that. I never said that,” Trump told a Des Moines Register columnist in Newton, Iowa.

But in the same interview, Trump again called New York City's decision to stop monitoring mosques in April 2014 a "big mistake."

“Something’s happening that’s really evil, really bad and it’s coming out of that area and it’s so unfair to so many Muslims that are such great people," he told the Register.

Bush's criticism of Trump's remarks is the most aggressive of any of the candidates in the GOP field, though several other contenders have sought to articiulate a different approach without slamming Trump directly.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for instance, told Fox News "The Kelly File" on Thursday evening that radicalism needs to be targeted wherever it lives, whether it means closing down a mosque or "a café, a diner" or "an Internet site."

"The bigger problem we have," Rubio continued, "is our inability to find out where these places are because we've crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities. So whatever facility is being used — it's not just a mosque — any facility that's being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States should be a place that we look at."

In the same interview, Rubio responded to the notion from President Barack Obama and other Democrats that evaluating refugees from Syria and Iraq on the basis of a "religious test" is playing into the terrorists' narrative.

The religious test, Rubio said, is already part of the law, and Christians would have an easier case to make that they are being persecuted at this current time.

"Christians are not just persecuted, they're slaughtered in the Middle East. And so that is a grounds already. We already have a religious test in the existing law, and that is applied," he explained. "But even there, you have to be able to pass some level of background check. Now, perhaps it might be easier on someone that's a well-known member of a Christian community, a well-established community, it might be easier."

"It's not that we're discriminating against anybody," Rubio continued. "It's that you cannot allow people in in this environment unless you know exactly who they are and why they are coming, and my point is, it is exceedingly difficult to do that with people coming from that part of the world right now."