Ben Carson: ‘It doesn’t mean you hate all dogs.’ Photograph: David Becker/Reuters
Republican presidential hopeful condemned after suggesting US needs to ‘determine who the mad dogs are’ so they can’t ‘run around the neighborhood’
The Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has said that blocking potential terrorists posing as Syrian refugees from entering the US was akin to handling a rabid dog.
At campaign stops in Alabama, Carson said halting Syrian resettlement in the US doesn’t mean America lacks compassion.
“If there’s a rabid dog running around in your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog,” Carson told reporters at one stop.
“It doesn’t mean you hate all dogs, but you’re putting your intellect into motion.”
Carson said that to “protect my children” he would “call the humane society and hopefully they can come take this dog away and create a safe environment once again”.
“By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly. Who are the people who want to come in here and hurt us and want to destroy us?”
He later repeated the comparison at a rally at the University of South Alabama, while telling hundreds of supporters that reporters had misrepresented his earlier remarks. “This is the kind of thing that they do,” he said, drawing laughs and applause.
Carson is among the GOP hopefuls who have called for closing the nation’s borders to Syrian refugees in the wake of the shooting and bombing attacks in Paris that killed 129 people and wounded hundreds more. The Islamic State terror group has claimed responsibility, stoking fears of future attacks across Europe and in the US.
The Council on American-Islamic relations condemned Carson’s dog comparisons and at the same time blasted another GOP hopeful, Donald Trump, for declining to rule out setting up a US government database and special identification cards for Muslims in America.
“Such extremist rhetoric is unbecoming of anyone who seeks our nation’s highest office and must be strongly repudiated by leaders from across the political spectrum,” said Robert McCaw’s, CAIR’s government affairs manager.
In Mobile, Carson said: “Islam itself is not necessarily our adversary.” But Americans were justified in seeing threats from Muslim refugees and the US shouldn’t “completely change who we are as Americans just so we can look like good people”.
He continued: “We have an American culture, and we have things that we base our values and principles on. I, for one, am not willing to give all those things away just so I can be politically correct.”