Watch: Obama Slams GOP Presidential Candidates For ‘Religious Test’ Comments After Paris Attacks

Speaking at the G20 in Turkey, President Barack Obama took a strong swing at Republican presidential candidates and other GOP leaders.

President Barack Obama today voiced a strong and thinly-veiled denunciation of GOP presidential candidates like Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson, for their comments about Syrian refugees in response to the Paris attacks by ISIS. He called their comments, calling for a religious test for refugees “shameful” and “not American.”

“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American,” Pres. Obama said late Monday morning. “That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

“We also have to remember that many of these refugees are victims of terrorism themselves,” the President, speaking at the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, noted.

Republicans have been using the attacks by ISIS on Paris to pander to their conservative Christian bases and to try to appear strong on issues of foreign relations, terrorism, and defense. 

“President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America: it is nothing less than lunacy,” GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz told Fox News. He added, the US should “not allow jihadists to come back to America using US passports to murder innocent men and women.”

And as NCRM reported Sunday, Jeb Bush took an especially hard tone, saying if elected, he would only accept Christian refugees into the United States.

“There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now,” Bush told CNN. “They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS. And I think we should have — we should focus our efforts as it relates to the Christians that are being slaughtered.”

Marco Rubio, who has been gaining in the GOP presidential polls, also weighed in strongly on ISIS.

“They literally want to overthrow our society and replace it with their radical, Sunni Islamic view of the future,” Rubio said Sunday.

At least four GOP governors have now declared no Syrian refugees will be allowed in their states.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson all banned Syrian refugees from coming into their states.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, still a presidential candidate, denounced Syrian refugees from being allowed to enter the US, but did not explicitly ban them from his state.

Watch:

UPDATE: 11:53 AM ET –
Jindal stops Syrian refugees.

 

Image: Screenshot via CNN/Twitter