President Donald Trump's proposed travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries is "cannon fodder" to ISIS "recruiters," former Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday.
Such a ban is "the worst thing we can do," Kerry told NBC News' "Meet The Press."
"A travel ban will be cannon fodder to the recruiters," he declared.
"We do extraordinary screening," he added, "but a great deal more effort has to go into the building of community, the reaching out and working with these entities, with these sectors of society so that there is not as significant a gap as there is in many parts of the world . . . not just in Britain, all over the world there is too much distance between government and the people."
Kerry said tech companies in Silicon Valley also have a "major responsibility" in the anti-terror fight, but going overboard could be "an enormous mistake."
ISIS "put out a message," he said, using an alternative name, Daesh, for the jihadists. "They can put it out on the internet. They can put it out in many different ways, saying to people during Ramadan 'you should attack people with cars, knives, and guns.'
"Now if you turn around and just blame that message exclusively on the Internet, we're making an enormous mistake. And if we reach too far without being sensitive to our own values, we give them an extraordinary victory. So, there is a balance here."
Kerry also called out Trump's "phony economic argument" for pulling out of the Paris climate accord, saying the president's assertion he will find a better deal is ""like O.J. Simpson saying he's going to find the real killer."
"There's an anger and a frustration in a lot of parts of America by average folks who have felt like they're getting screwed by the government and by life over the course of last years," he said, complaining however, "There's no surprise to me that you can camouflage . . . in a phony economic argument that has no relationship to the reality of what is happening in the marketplace."
"When Donald Trump says to the world, 'well, we're going to negotiate a better deal . . . he's going to go out and find a better deal . . . that's that's like O.J. Simpson saying he's going to find the real killer. He's not going to do that, because he doesn't believe in it. If you did believe it, you wouldn't pull out of Paris."
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