Ted Cruz

<youtube size="small" align="right" caption="Senator Ted Cruz at Defeat Jihad Summit 2015">mkVwDSoSyNM</youtube> US right-wing Senator running for president.

He attended and spoke at Defeat Jihad Summit 2015, along with Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee.

When Donald Trump proposed banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. in December 2015, Cruz said he disagreed with the idea, but he refused to criticize Trump and said, 'I understand why Donald made that proposal.' Following the attacks in Brussels on March 22 2016, Cruz issued a call for the United States to 'immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al-Qaida or ISIS presence.' He also called for a 'need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.'

The Texas senator told Bloomberg in a 2015 interview,

'If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neocons, they have consistently mis-perceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.'

Presidential campaign

Affiliations with Islamophobia network

Campaign manager

Cruz's presidential campaign manager Chad Sweet is a director of the US arm of the UK based counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation.

Advisors

Of the eight people appointed as advisors to 2016 candidates Donald Trump and Senator Cruz, all have connections to Center for Security Policy and half hold ranking positions within the group.

In March 2016, The Intercept wrote that he 'unveiled a foreign policy team full of conspiracy theorists and arch-neoconservatives who support policies just as belligerent as those of Donald Trump'. These include:

• Frank Gaffney: president of 'famously Islamophobic' Center for Security Policy. He has developed a number of theories about how Muslims are invading and conquering the United States, including by infiltrating the government via the Muslim Brotherhood and by conquering Dearborn, Michigan, and turning it into a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims. He also thinks tax lobbyist Grover Norquist is a stealth jihadist.

Of him Cruz said a few months before that :'Frank is a patriot, he loves this country, and he’s clear-eyed about radical Islamic terrorism.'

• Andrew McCarthy: a former assistant U.S. attorney and far-right pundit for the National Review. He has claimed that President Obama was 'raised as a Muslim,' and that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin may be infiltrating the U.S. government on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has also been an active supporter of post-9/11 torture practiced by the Bush administration, including waterboarding, which he has written 'is not torture and was never illegal under U.S. law.'

• Michael Ledeen: a Reagan-era consultant for the National Security Council, now a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. During the 1980s, he helped set up the deal at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. In 2002, following warnings from former George H. Bush National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft that invading Iraq 'could turn the whole region into a cauldron,' Ledeen wrote, 'One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.' In the run-up to the invasion, he darkly suggested that the war may need to go 'far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe.' Since the failure of the war, he has continued to advocate further destabilizing actions across the Middle East, particularly in Iran.

• Elliott Abrams: a former Reagan and Bush official who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal. He was a signatory of the Project for the New American Century’s 1998 letter calling on President Clinton to ramp up military operations against Iraq. He was one of President George W. Bush’s key Middle East advisers. The month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, he told Americans not to worry about civilians, saying, 'We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.' In 2010, he complained that American Jews lacked a sufficient 'commitment to Israel' because they voted for President Obama. He is an advocate for an expansive American ground presence in Syria, especially in terms of advisors.

• Clare Lopez: a longtime Frank Gaffney ally, a key figure at CSP, previously serving as a fellow before becoming vice president of the think tank. In 2014, she said that because Obama’s father was Muslim, that 'de facto makes him a Muslim,' which in turn explains why the president 'attacks and punishes Israel while allowing the Islamic State to grow and conquer.' She has also long claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood has 'infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist … the mission of its grand jihad.'

• Fred Fleitz: Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs at CSP. He is a co-author of a 2015 report published by CSP titled, “The Secure Freedom Strategy: A Plan for Victory Over the Global Jihad Movement”. Other authors include Jerry Boykin, Frank Gaffney and Clare Lopez. The report concludes with a number of radical recommendations including stopping the immigration of 'Shariah-adherent' individuals to the U.S.

• Retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin: said things such as 'Islam is evil. Islam is an evil concept.' As he puts it, 'Islam is not a religion and does not deserve First Amendment protections,' because 'those following the dictates of the Quran are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with sharia law.' He also declared that Christians should 'go on the offensive' to prevent Muslims in America from building any more mosques.

• Katherine Gorka, president of the Council on Global Security, a group that produces research on Islamist violence, and who said in an email that Cruz 'understands the vital role that America's military strength plays across the globe but without wanting to engage the U.S. in expensive democracy-building adventures.'

Affiliations

• Defeat Jihad Summit 2015