Members of a Fox News “business show” panel fell over themselves endorsing Ted Cruz’s plan for more targeted policing of Muslims “neighborhoods.” Never mind that New York’s police commissioner has blasted Cruz for the suggestion. These business experts and a talk show host think they know better. 

Panelist and talk show host Gina Loudon doesn’t have a single credit in national security, policing or terrorism. But she sided with Cruz, saying. “We’re at war right now” and accusing President Obama of not recognizing that fact “while he’s out dancing and golfing and doing the wave at baseball games.” Loudon continued, “This is a real, true insurgent war, and we’re talking about keeping all neighborhoods safe. We’re talking about keeping people around the mosques safe, too, because if any area is at risk, it would be where the hotbed of the activity is going on, but that makes all Americans safer.”

Actually, it doesn’t make Americans safer, according to NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. He wrote in a scathing op-ed:

It is clear from his comments that Sen. Cruz knows absolutely nothing about counterterrorism in New York City. We have in this city, without a doubt, the most effective and extensive counterterrorism capacity of any city in this country and virtually any city in the world.

… We police our city not by campaign slogans or inflammatory rhetoric, but by an old piece of parchment called the U.S. Constitution and another called the Bill of Rights.

But panelist Jonathan Hoenig took Cruz’ plan to a whole new level of ignorant, anti-American sloganeering.

HOENIG: Muslim American rights are upheld more in America here than they are anywhere else in the world. To Gina’s point, I mean, jihadism is at war with the west, and it needs to be destroyed, not just degraded, not just deterred as Obama talks about when he’s doing the Lambada or the Tango or whatever it is.

I think it’s going to necessitate a total war in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but in the interim at least working with these Muslim communities, just as we work with gang communities, where there’s gang violence being festered, work with these communities where there’s possible hotbeds of local home grown terrorism.

But what Hoenig has in mind for Muslim communities in America is a lot more ominous than “working with” them.

HOENIG: This notion that if we patrol, if we do investigations, if we do police work in America, to keep Americans safe, somehow, you’re going to radicalize people that are already here simply by doing their job, your job. And that is the president’s job. To eliminate radical Islam wherever it is, whether it’s in mosques, whether it’s in churches or synagogues or schools or anywhere else. That’s his primary job and I think he’s not doing it. In fact, he’s dropping the ball because …he’s comparing police work with the destruction of individual rights as happens in Cuba on a daily basis.

Actually, it is not the president’s “primary” or any other kind of job to eliminate radical Islam, it’s his job to keep the country safe and if Hoenig can’t see that there’s a difference, he has no business spouting off about this. Furthermore, who’s going to decide who’s a “radical” Muslim and who's a "safe" Muslim? It’s a slippery, anti-American slope and not a single other member of the panel called Hoenig out on it.

Democratic panelist Jessica Tarlov did note Bratton’s scorching criticism. “NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton came out and said Ted Cruz doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she said. “I understand what Ted Cruz is saying, but he’s just riling people up and, frankly, that policy I believe that would make us less safe.” She also noted that New York City dropped its program of targeting Muslim neighborhoods because it was ineffective.

But host Eric Bolling endorsed Hoenig’s comments by misconstruing and downplaying their import. “Jonathan’s right. Playing around and trying to protect their feelings, the terrorists’ feelings, so they don’t get mad at us, is PC stuff, is getting people killed.”

Loudon agreed.

Watch the amateur, knee-jerk reactions of bigotry below, from the March 26 Cashin’ In.