US Accepts Less Than 3 Percent Christian Refugees, 96 Percent Muslims

The deaths of 129 people in Paris on Friday in attacks for which Islamic State claimed responsibility have given Democratic and Republican candidates an opening to debate what steps to take against militants. “They don’t normally come with embedded terrorists in their midst”.

The proposals that Christians should be prioritized as refugees from Syria were shameful and un-American, the president told a G20 press conference in southern Turkey. “Maybe you could be somebody who is going to commit crimes against Americans'”. “It is very important…that we do not close our hearts to the victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism”.

Rising anti-refugee sentiment: Obama was referring to a series of statements, growing in number and intensity, by members of the Republican Party encouraging the federal government to treat all Muslim refugees from Syria as suspected terrorists. “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 said over the weekend during a campaign event in SC, according to the Washington Post.

“That’s not American, it’s not who we are”, Obama said, urging America’s politicians to fight the “dark impulse” to judge people for their beliefs.

A few Republican candidates have said they are wary of accepting Syrian refugees after the attacks and two dozen state governors, mostly Republicans, have vowed not to accept any.

Well, another day, another opportunity for the Republican presidential candidates to show off how much they hate foreigners.

McCains comments Tuesday backed up Obama, who earlier this week called a religious test shameful and not American. “It would be foolish for them not to do that”. The other 33 identified as belonging to smaller religious faiths or said they had no religion. “To bring them over here, under these circumstances, is a suspension of intellect”, and would ignore “the reason the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals”. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said on Sunday the US should accept any refugee that can be properly screened, but added that the focus should be on Christians.

Bush told CNNs “State of the Union” Sunday, “There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now. (America should have let in more Jewish refugees during the Second World War; that wouldn’t have meant turning away Thomas Mann.) And it is a brutal insult to Syrians who have gone through four and half years of carnage to say that the fact that they are Sunnis gives them a few sort of immunity from ISIS or from the Assad regime. “We should, if there’s any kind of concern, we shouldn’t allow people in, but I don’t think we should eliminate our support for refugees; it’s been a noble tradition in our country”. Not to be outdone on the lunacy front, Jeb Bush openly called for Christian refugees to be given preferential treatment.

Limiting refugee entry to Christians is analogous to the proposal by a few that we exclude males in a specific age category – say 16 to 40 – on the theory that the vast majority of terrorists are men within this range of age. Tonight, House Speaker Paul Ryan calling for a pause in the President’s plan to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees to the US, saying it’s better to be safe than sorry and just today, Donald Trump, sitting down with our own Barbara Walters.