Despite a scathing smackdown from NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, Ted Cruz continues to insist that New York ran a successful Muslim profiling operation that was only ended out of “political correctness." Host Shannon Bream allowed Cruz’s lie to stand unchallenged.
During a Fox New Sunday interview yesterday, Bream asked “What exactly” were the “practicalities” that Cruz was proposing when he said, in the wake of the Brussels bombings, "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized."
Cruz responded by reiterating a previous attack on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio:
You know, there was a successful program in New York City that was started under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It did exactly this. It engaged cooperatively with the Muslim community but it got involved to prevent radicalization, to prevent radical Islamic terror cells from forming and to prevent any acts of terror before they're carried out.
Now, unfortunately, liberal Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, when he got elected, one of the first things he did, in a nod to political correctness, is he disbanded that unit. That doesn't make any sense. We need to be going after where the threat comes from and the threat comes from radicalization.
New York’s police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has scorched Cruz’ claim saying, “He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.” Following up in an editorial on Saturday, Bratton wrote,
Cruz repeated the false reports surrounding the NYPD Demographics Unit and my decision to abolish it because it wasn’t serving any useful purpose. He tried to depict the demise of the unit, as other ill-informed observers have done, as a knuckling under to the forces of political correctness rather than the sensible administrative decision that it was. The fact is that the former administration had allowed the unit to dwindle down to two investigators. Why? Because the work of the unit, which was to map the ethnic makeup of the city to better understand the domain of the New York metropolitan area, was finished. The two remaining detectives simply had little to do.
…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.
Furthermore, Democrat Jessica Tarlov recently noted on Fox News that the New York City program was ineffective and possibly even counter-productive.
But Bream let Cruz’ lie stand. Instead of challenging his claim, she allowed him to move on to suggest that President Obama is allowing us to become like Europe (even though our Muslim population is vastly different).
Rather than present Cruz with facts, Bream played clips of Obama and Hillary Clinton taking digs at him. She then asked, “So, as a first term senator, as the secretary suggested, are you in over your head on foreign policy?
It was a way for Bream to look like a tough questioner when, in reality, she was doing little more than feeding a (Republican) guest an opening to attack Democrats. Had she really wanted to know – or better yet, inform viewers – about Cruz's foreign policy chops, she would have dug deeper into his prescriptions.
Instead, we got just what she asked for, while pretending otherwise:
CRUZ: Listen, I'll tell who you is in over their head and it's Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and the entire Obama administration. The Obama-Clinton foreign policy is a manifest disaster. Every single region on earth, Shannon, has gotten worse.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Watch it below, from the March 27 Fox News Sunday.