GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Friday that his opponent Donald Trump was "manipulating people's angst and their fears" with his comments on Muslims in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Paris.
Following those attacks, which left at least 129 people dead, Trump has said he would consider closing down U.S. mosques and creating a database to track Muslims in the country -- and had no concrete answer when asked how that plan would differ from Nazi Germany's monitoring of Jews.
"There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases," Trump told NBC News on Thursday. "I would certainly implement that, absolutely."
Bush, a former Florida governor, said that idea was "just wrong."
"It’s not a question of toughness. It’s manipulating people's angst and their fears. That’s not strength. That’s weakness," he said on CNBC's "Squawk Box," as reported by Politico. "And look, campaigns are important for sure. We’re electing a president, but there are things that are important as it relates to the values that we have as a country that make us special and unique, and we should not and we will never abandon them in the pursuit of this fight."
"We don't have to," Bush continued. "We can protect our freedoms here."
The Islamic State militant group, also called ISIS and Daesh, claimed credit for the attacks in Paris, setting off a wave of backlash against Syrian refugees and, in many cases, against Muslims in general. A majority of U.S. governors have said they would not welcome Syrian refugees -- something states don't actually have the authority to decide -- and the House voted on Thursday to make it harder for displaced Syrians to come to the U.S. at all.
Bush said Tuesday that he thought the governors were "doing the right thing because they haven’t gotten any information about what the screening process is." (For the record, the current process is rigorous, on average taking between 18 and 24 months to complete.) Bush also said the U.S. should have a "pause" and then continue to accept some Syrian refugees, such as Christians and "orphans or people that clearly aren’t going to be terrorists."
But he has also spoken out against anti-refugee rhetoric, including the suggestions from some quarters that the U.S. should consider creating Japanese internment-style camps for Syrian refugees who are already here.
He said at a town hall on Thursday that "we need to be careful about not trampling over the values that are important in our country."
"I think it's appropriate to pause and get a better sense of how you go about screening. If it's not satisfactory, don't do it," he said. "Err on the side of caution, given this Islamic terrorist threat."
"But my God, I mean, we've had history where we've had to... We've felt bad afterwards, internment camps and things like that," he went on. "I think we need to be cautious, as we go through this, not to get to a point where our emotions overtake our brain. There ought to be a balance."
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