Fox News Host Confronts Kathy Barnette on Anti-Muslim Tweets

Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Kathy Barnette was confronted Sunday on Fox News Sunday about anti-Muslim tweets that she posted including ones that targeted former President Barack Obama.

Host Shannon Bream asked the Senate hopeful during a segment about the context in which those tweets were posted.

"Obama is aMuslim. Doing Muslim like THINGS!," Barnette tweeted in 2016, touting false claims about the former president's faith. She targeted Obama, who is a devout Christian, again later that year, by tweeting: "Obama would NEVER lie or evade the American people. He's a Muslim, errrr, American," in reference to the Iran nuclear deal.

"Let me just say in almost all of those tweets...especially when you look at the timeframe we were living in, at that particular time, we had the Obama administration bringing in a lot of Syrian refugees at that time," Barnette told Bream, adding that she was concerned that refugees weren't being properly vetted.

The Fox News host also mentioned one of Barnette's anti-Muslim tweets that dated back to 2014 in which she said that Islam "must not be allowed to thrive under any condition" in an effort to protect freedom.

"The overwhelming majority of the tweets that are now being presented are not even full thoughts. They're not even full sentences. And yet people take it and they begin to build their own narrative around it," Barnette said. "So I can't provide a lot of context because again, it's almost 10 years ago, that's how far they have to go back to try to find anything on me."

In 2015, Barnette wrote on Twitter that "Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam." However, she rejected that thought when she was asked about it by NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in a Meet the Press interview clip that was posted Friday.

"Yeah, no, I don't think that's me. I would never have said that. Okay, I would have never said that, because I don't believe that," Barnette said.

In 2019, Barnette took a hit at Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, who made history by becoming the first Muslim woman to ever serve in the state's legislature, after the congresswoman made comments about former President Donald Trump.

"Aren't you all so glad that you voted in the first 'openly' Palestinian Muslim? (Sarcasm for ya'll who don't get sarcasm," she tweeted.

Newsweek reached out to Barnette's office for comments.