The Five's lone liberal, Bob Beckel, jumped on his employers’ Islamophobia train and took it down the track further than any of the conservatives I’ve seen on Fox in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Beckel announced that we should restrict most Muslim or Chinese students from studying here.

Beckel’s original comments seemed to be a response to Tom Brokaw’s remarks on Meet The Press last weekend - and which have now made him a Fox News target - in which Brokaw suggested we consider the role our drone policy has played in Muslim sentiment toward the U.S. Apparently dismissing the substance of Brokaw’s remarks (as The O’Reilly Factor did), Beckel said:

In the Muslim communities around the world, they do not like us. They recruit people from poor areas and they turn ‘em into terrorists.

…It’s not hard to recruit, though, because the hatred for the United States runs deep. So that’s why I get back to my point. I think we really have to consider, given the fact so many people hate us, that we’re going to have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we’ve got, look at what we’ve got, and decide whether some of the people here should be gone, be sent back home or sent to prison.

Apparently, letting any of those students stay because they're just here to learn isn't a possibility.

Beckel “clarified” yesterday, after noting that a Chinese student had been one of the victims mortally wounded in the Boston Marathon bombing:

I think anybody who’s here as a Chinese student or a Muslim student should stay here and finish their education. It is now time for us, though, to take a pause and a breath and take a hard look at the future of immigration of students. And therefore, I think that we ought to be very selective in allowing any Muslim or future Chinese students in here, ‘cause Chinese students are brought here, taught computers, go back home and hack us.

Of course, Chinese hackers have little or nothing to do with Muslim terrorists but what's a little extraneous xenophobia among Fox friends? Furthermore, if Beckel were serious about his idea, he ought to have pointed out, as Yahoo recently noted, that cash-strapped colleges and universities rely on foreign students for tuition dollars and that Chinese students make up more than a quarter of the total, most of whom study business and management. In other words, Beckel's simplistic solution does not take into account a more complex reality of home-grown terrorism and foreign students. But then again, simplistic, black and white, us and them thinking is a hallmark of most Fox News discussions.