Romney stands by comments about Muslims

A while back the Chief posted here about Governor Mit Romney (R-MA) calling for increased surveillance in radical mosques to nip terrorism in the bud.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Massachusetts delivered a letter, which was co-signed by 21 other organizations, saying that Romney’s comments characterized Muslims living in the U.S. as potential or actual terrorists.

Well, as expected the PC moonbat crowd from the ACLU to assorted Islamist groups got all hot and bothered and demanded retractions and an apology. So, what’s a pol to do when faced with this sort of criticism? Back down? Waffle?

Usually so, but not in this case! In a more recent press conference:

Romney told reporters that he stood by his comments. “When it comes to protecting our citizens, there is no place for political correctness. We should be doing more in terms of intelligence and counterterrorism in the state to protect ourselves from terrorists. We spend a lot of our resources thinking about response, but response can’t protect us. We have to be able to prevent attacks.”

Talk about saying the unspeakable ut true!

Romney said that if U.S. intelligence officials have information that a person is “preaching messages of hate and terror,” then there should be sufficient grounds to conduct surveillance on them in their places of worship. “Surely, we have to recognize that some of this has gone on in mosques in the past,” Romney said. “Most mosques are teaching doctrines of love and consideration, but there have been places of extremism where certain teachers have been identified as having been involved in or led to terrorist attacks. Let’s not pretend that’s not the case.”

This is really excellent, not only to highlight a potentially serious security issue, but then to NOT back down in the face of the usual barrage of politically correct complaints about having done so.