Thread: Donald Trump and Chris Christie Square Off Over Racial Profiling

Donald Trump and Chris Christie Square Off Over Racial Profiling

Dec.6, 2015

By Patrick Healy

The Republican presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey clashed on Sunday over Mr. Trump’s support for profiling people on the basis of race or religion after the shootings in California by a Muslim couple with ties to the Islamic State.

And Hillary Clinton argued that the United States was “not winning” the broader fight against Islamic State militants, but she stopped short of embracing Republican calls for President Obama to announce a new counterterrorism strategy in his scheduled televised address to the nation Sunday night. Instead, Mrs. Clinton focused on additional steps to battle the Islamic State, like asking Facebook and Twitter executives to delete “announcements and appeals” promoting terrorism that are posted on their networks.

The American strategy against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL or Daesh, and questions about surveillance and intelligence-gathering against possible homegrown terrorists, dominated Sunday morning news show interviews with several presidential candidates as they staked out security positions and tried to make political points before Mr. Obama’s address. One of the Republicans, Ben Carson, also sought to defend his gaffe last week in a speech to Jewish Republicans in which he repeatedly pronounced “Hamas” as “hummus.”

Mr. Trump, whose lead in many opinion polls has begun to grow, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Americans have been too politically correct regarding Muslims and repeated his disgust over reports that neighbors did not contact authorities with concerns about the California couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, out of fear that it could be considered racial profiling. Mr. Trump, who has called for mosques to be monitored and for a database to track Muslims, made his clearest statement yet in support of racial profiling, a controversial tactic of some law enforcement officials to consider race, ethnicity, and other factors in detaining people.

“I think there can be profiling,” Mr. Trump said. “If they thought there was something wrong with that group and they saw what was happening, and they didn’t want to call the police because they didn’t want to be profiling, I think that’s pretty bad. People are dead. A lot of people are dead right now. So everybody wants to be politically correct, and that’s part of the problem that we have with our country.”

Mr. Christie, who has begun directly challenging Mr. Trump after being buoyed by some recent endorsements, including the influential Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire, said Mr. Trump’s position on profiling reflected a lack of “experience and understanding” in handling national security threats.

“The fact is we don’t need to be profiling in order to be able to get the job done here,” Mr. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, said on “Face the Nation.” “Increased surveillance, creating relationships with mosques in the Muslim-American community across the country – we did that after 9/11 and prevented attacks in New Jersey and all across the country. What you need is a president who’s had the experience and the know how to do this and not someone who’s just going to talk off the top of their head.”

Mr. Trump’s suspicions toward Muslims also came under attack from two other Republican candidates who are far behind in opinion polls, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Mr. Bush, asked on ABC’s “This Week” if the California shootings made him rethink his criticism of Mr. Trump’s support for scrutinizing mosques, said he still opposed sweeping surveillance tactics but added that federal agents should “redouble our efforts” to monitoring suspected terrorists.

“We don’t have to target the religion,” Mr. Bush said. “We just have to target those that have co-opted the religion and make sure that we’re fully aware of the radicalizations taking place, not just here but all around the world.”

Mr. Kasich, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said he continued to oppose registering Muslims but also called for more intelligence-gathering tools, such as a collaboration between the federal government and technology companies to crack the encryption of messages by suspected terrorists. He also said Mr. Obama should use his speech to announce a more aggressive strategy to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“Mark my words, we will ultimately have to do it, and the longer we wait, the more complicated and the more costly it will be,” Mr. Kasich said.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida also called for increased airstrikes and a largely Sunni Arab ground force to battle the Islamic State. Closer to home, he defended his vote – and those of most other Senate Republicans – against legislation last week that would have barred people on terrorist watch lists from buying firearms.

“The majority of people on the no-fly list are oftentimes people that basically just have the same name as somebody else who don’t belong on the no-fly list,” he said on CNN, before backing down slightly and saying “a very significant number of people” were erroneously included on the lists. “There’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion,” he said. “And now they’re having their Second Amendment right being impeded upon.”

Mrs. Clinton and a Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for the most part chose not to put pressure on Mr. Obama before his speech. Mrs. Clinton, appearing on “This Week,” said she did not believe a formal declaration of war against the Islamic State was necessary and said she thought Mr. Obama would announce “an intensification of the existing strategy” in his speech Sunday. And she made clear that she did not see the current strategy as sufficient.

“We’re not winning, but it’s too soon to say that we are doing everything we need to do,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We have to fight them in the air. We have to fight them on ground and we have to fight on the Internet. And we have to do everything we can with our friends and partners around the world to protect ourselves.”

Mr. Sanders, for his part, said the United States had to be “as aggressive as we can” against the Islamic State but continued to oppose an American-led military ground operation, saying “we have to learn the lessons” from the Iraq war.

Mr. Carson, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” defended himself after his speech on Thursday to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he read from prepared remarks and incorrectly pronounced “Hamas” several times, making it sound like “hummus.”

“You know, we need to get to the point where we start looking at the substance of what is being said, not the style in which it’s being said,” Mr. Carson said. “You know, that’s the sign of maturity. And I actually believe that the people of this country are going to recognize that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/firs...rofiling/?_r=0

Why the big deal about profiling on religion when the terrorism we're fighting is from a particular religion? I really don't get that as anything other than typical investigative profiling like the FBI does every day with everyone they're trying to find.

I think Christie cooked his goose on this one. Wasn't he Attorney General before he was Governor and he doesn't know what someone is talking about when they profile for criminals and terrorists? Look at what Christie said:

“The fact is we don’t need to be profiling in order to be able to get the job done here,” Mr. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, said on “Face the Nation.” “Increased surveillance, creating relationships with mosques in the Muslim-American community across the country – we did that after 9/11 and prevented attacks in New Jersey and all across the country. What you need is a president who’s had the experience and the know how to do this and not someone who’s just going to talk off the top of their head.”

"don't need to be profiling" ... okay .....

"increased surveillance" .... oh whom? Muslims?

"creating relationships with mosques in the Muslim-American community" ..... why Mosques in Muslim communities?

Hey, Moron, that IS profiling, the very type of profiling Trump is talking about. If you're chasing Muslim religious terrorists, then you're a) profiling Muslims b) based on their religion.

How do such stupid people raise so far before we figure out how dumb they really are?!

Sad.