Kasich Decries Trump Supporters That Booed Muslim Protester — ‘That’s Just Not the Way to Behave’

Saturday on CNN’s “Smerconish,” host Michael Smerconish asked Gov. John Kasich (R-OH), a candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination, about an incident at a Donald Trump rally a day earlier involving a Muslim woman being ejected from the rally for protesting and the crowd’s reaction to it.

Kasich criticized the crowd and warned of driving Muslims away with such actions.

“Terrible,” Kasich said. You know, we are not a country that — you know, a country that feels good about insulting or yelling at people, or demeaning people. So, you know, maybe it was a Friday night, and who knows, but — look.  People want to come to my rallies, they want to come to my town halls, they’re welcome. I mean, I’ve had people disrupt, but that’s all part of America, right? I mean — but I just don’t like the tearing apart of the country, because if we want to fix the border or if we want to fix Social Security, if we want to create an environment for job creation, we’re not going to get it done by tearing one another apart. And I also have to tell you that, Michael, we’ve just seen — we’ve just seen this North Korean situation, and one of the great things that troubles me is the ability of a country like North Korea to be able to give very dangerous materials or weapons technology to non-state actors.”

“That would be people like Hezbollah, ISIS, Hamas, and the entire world is going to have to stop that, because if that’s not the case, we’re going to see — we could potentially see horrific things happen in this world,” he continued. “And we have many Muslim countries that are moderate in nature, and they respect women and civilization and history, and we don’t want to be alienating people like that, because you remember the first gulf war where both Arabs and the westerners went and drove Saddam out of Kuwait? That’s what it has to look like again when we go after ISIS, and if we’re attacking Muslims, they’re not going to — you know, we just drive them farther away.  We’ll get through this. We’ll get over that. That’s just not the way to behave.”

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