Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush called out some of his Republican peers on Friday for rhetoric on Syrians and Muslims that he called “just wrong.”
The former Florida governor was asked about recent comments from GOP front-runner Donald Trump and others about how to respond in the U.S. to the crisis in Syria and rise of ISIS.
“When you talk about internment, you talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people — that’s just wrong,” Bush said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Bush was interviewed just hours after Trump called for a national database of Muslims, saying he “would certainly implement that. Absolutely,” when asked about it by NBC News during a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa. “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases.”
Trump has also said the U.S. should consider closing mosques, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another presidential candidate, said Thursday that the U.S. should close any institution that is “used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States.”
The Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, also made national headlines by citing Japanese internment during WWII as a model policy.
Bush repudiated that kind of language on Friday.
“It’s not a question of toughness, it’s manipulating people’s angst and their fears,” Bush said. “That’s not strength, that’s weakness.”
The middle-of-the-pack candidate said despite the importance of the campaign trail, politics shouldn’t cause anyone to “abandon” the values that make American “special and unique,” including its openness.
He also blamed the left and the right for unhelpful rhetoric.
“We have two competing sets of pessimism in this country in the political realm,” Bush said. “On the left we have Barack Obama who constantly is saying that anyone who disagrees with him is bad. … On the right we have an emerging group as well who tell us we should abandon American values. I think we should be resolute in the fight of Islamic terrorists. … but we should do this in protection of our values, not the abandonment of them.”