GOP Candidates Follow DeSantis’s Lead, Oppose Welcoming Gaza Refugees to America

As Israel’s war on Hamas rages, should America let in Palestinian refugees? Governor DeSantis was the first Republican presidential candidate to come out strongly against accepting any Gazan refugees. Now, many of his GOP rivals are following suit.Some 600,000 Palestinian refugees have fled Gaza City and the surrounding area for Gaza’s south ahead of an expected Israeli ground offensive, and the United Nations is warning of a humanitarian crisis. President Biden has yet to announce any plans to welcome Gazan refugees, though some progressives in his party are calling on the U.S. to do so. Egypt and Jordan say they don’t want to take in what is expected to be as many as a million Palestinians fleeing Gaza.“We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees,” Mr. DeSantis said in Iowa over the weekend. “If you look at how they behave — not all of them are Hamas, but they’re all antisemitic.”Mr. DeSantis is getting some pushback, even from his own party, for his comments, but he isn’t backing down. “My position is very clear. I was the first presidential candidate to say no Gaza refugees, period,” Mr. DeSantis said in an interview. “Why? Because we don’t want to import the pathologies from the Gaza Strip and other places in the Middle East to the United State of America. They are taught to hate Jews.”These statements echo what President Trump said during his 2016 campaign, when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Mr. Trump’s so-called Muslim ban came one month after the deadly ISIS terrorist attack at the Bataclan theater at Paris, and after months of lone-wolf ISIS attacks across Europe.Mr. Trump was widely condemned as Islamophobic at the time. Now, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling Mr. DeSantis’s remarks “destructive and dangerous.” On CNN, she pointed to the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois on Saturday as an example of the anti-Muslim sentiment that she says comments like Mr. DeSantis’s help fuel.On CNN over the weekend, another GOP presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that when she was the United Nations ambassador, “half” of Gazans “didn’t want to be under Hamas’s rule.” Ms. Haley was responding to a question about Mr. DeSantis’s remarks.“America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists, and that’s what we have to do,” Ms. Haley said.Ms. Haley’s campaign, though, is now clarifying her position. “Nikki Haley does not think the U.S. should be accepting any Gazans. She thinks Hamas-supporting countries like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey should take any refugees,” Ms. Haley’s press secretary, Ken Farnaso, tells the Sun.On Saturday, another GOP presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, did not give a direct answer when asked by the Sun whether America should accept Palestinian refugees. Yet on Tuesday, Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign communications director, Tricia McLaughlin, was clear.“Vivek would not allow refugees from Gaza into the U.S. We would look at helping facilitate their emigration to other countries, but this is not an issue where we should risk U.S. security or trade off the well-being of Americans here in the homeland,” Ms. McLaughlin tells the Sun.On Monday night, Senator Scott addressed the refugee issue at a Georgetown event, saying it’s “the right decision” not to accept these refugees now because vetting is difficult.“I don’t think they’re all antisemitic. I just can’t tell who’s who,” Mr. Scott said.Mr. Trump’s campaign, in typical fashion, is not moderating its tone or message. In an email sent out Monday, the former president called to reinstate his “travel ban on entry from terror-plagued countries” and for “full suspension” of the Department of State’s refugee resettlement program. He is also calling for “ideological screening” for all immigrants and to deport and revoke student visas from “jihadists and their sympathizers.”These positions, which were outside the Overton window in 2016, have now become mainstream in the GOP. Americans are watching pro-Palestinian rallies erupt across the country. Many pro-Palestinian student groups and professors are refusing to condemn — some are even celebrating — Hamas’s barbaric attacks on October 7 that killed 1,400 people in Israel, including women, children, and the elderly.At Dearborn, Michigan, which has the largest per-capita Muslim population in the United States, thousands rallied on Saturday, waving Palestinian flags and holding signs that said, “Free Palestine” and “Victory to the Palestinian Resistance.”“The whole immigration/assimilation thing is going well,” a TV host, Megyn Kelly, posted to X. The post went viral.

GOP Candidates Follow DeSantis’s Lead, Oppose Welcoming Gaza Refugees to America

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