Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is right in suggesting the United States should do more to fight radical Islam inside the United States, former assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle tells
Newsmax TV.
"He's certainly right in arguing that we need to do much more than we are now doing," Perle said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show." "We need to concentrate resources where the threat is."
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The question of how the United States deals with Muslim immigrants is a more difficult and complicated question, Perle said.
"It's certainly right that we should be very careful about who we're admitting to the United States," he said. "That means much better control over our border because border can be penetrated by Latin American, Central American workers [and] can also be penetrated by terrorists."
Terrorists will sneak in with refugees or across the southern and northern borders, he said, and it is vital to keep an eye on the mosques that preach a radical form of Islam.
Many mosques in the United States and Europe fit that bill, he said, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is "making a very serious mistake" if he thinks monitoring them is a bad idea.
De Blasio on Wednesday
called Cruz's statement "demagoguery."
President Barack Obama has been criticized for not cutting his trip to Cuba and Argentina short, where he was seen taking in a baseball game and dancing the tango.
Perle said those actions are "hardly the behavior of someone who leads a great nation and who takes seriously the threat" of the Islamic State.
"I think he gave the game away when he made a remark that terrorism is not an existential threat," he said. "What does he mean by that? Does he mean that because an act of terror will not destroy every living American and end our existence as a nation? We can be indifferent to the magnitude of the threat that does exist?"
Such remarks run counter to the sense of danger that ISIS eventually wants to strike with a weapon of mass destruction," Perle said.
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