Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) expressed fears of an extremist Muslim “invasion” of America in an interview on Monday, outlining a strict vision for how Muslims should assimilate into the United States and doubling down on his recent controversial comments about Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe.
According to Buzzfeed, Jindal spoke at length about Muslim immigration during an interview on the Washington Watch radio show, hosted by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. Jindal began the segment by defending remarks he made earlier this month about so-called “no-go zones,” or areas in England and France that some American conservatives have erroneously claimed are so dominated by extremist Muslims that police forces simply do not enter.
“If we’re not careful the same no-go zones you’re seeing now in Europe will come to America,” Jindal said. “What is not acceptable and what you’ve seen in Europe and this is a very serious particular threat, you’ve got those that do want to try to impose a form of sharia law. And sharia law is antithetical, mutually exclusive of freedom, in treating women as first-class citizens, it is antithetical to the values we hold dear. And you see, third, fourth generation immigrants in the U.K., France, in other places in Europe that don’t consider themselves part of those societies and that’s very dangerous.”
You can listen to the whole segment below, collected by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.
Contrary to Jindal’s claims about “no-go zones,” however, there aren’t actually autonomous “zones” in Europe so dominated by extremist Muslims that police simply refuse to enter. In fact, after Jindal spoke of “no-go zones” while delivering a speech in London last week, he was unable to name a specific neighborhood when confronted by a British CNN reporter. Similarly, “no-go zones” were also mentioned several times by Fox News commentators over the past few weeks, prompting Prime Minister David Cameron to publicly refute the claim and even call one pundit “a complete idiot.” Fox News has since issued several apologies for their various uses of the phrase, admitting that “no-go zones” don’t actually exist.
Jindal, however, refused to acknowledge the inaccuracy of such claims during the interview, arguing instead that Americans should “demand” that Muslims “assimilate” to Western culture and saying that English should be made the national language of the United States.
“What’s not acceptable is people who want to come and conquer us,” Jindal said. “That’s not immigration, by the way, that’s colonization. If someone wants to come here and change our fundamental culture and our values, or if they want to set up their own culture and values, that’s not immigration, that’s really invasion.”
“The reality is that if people don’t want to be Americans, they shouldn’t come to America. They should stay where they are.”
Jindal isn’t the only conservative politician to make false claims about no-go zones. Although experts agree that the regions aren’t real, right-wing lawmakers appear to be turning the false concept into a talking point. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), for example, also spoke about “no-go zones” in a radio interview on The Bill Bennett Show earlier this month, where he implied that the presence of such regions sparked the recent slaughter of Charlie Hebdo journalists by jihadists in Paris, France.
“They look upon that almost as an autonomous Muslim region, or even country, within France,” King said. “They make no effort to be part of France. So no, it’s definitely a threat to France’s sovereignty, and, when something like this occurs, it makes it virtually impossible to find out what’s going on in those communities. You can be having all sorts of plots being formulated and put together, and we would not be aware of it.”
King also repeatedly insisted that such zones were a threat to a nation’s ability to govern, seemingly unaware that while no such regions exist in France, the United States actually does have several autonomous, self-governing areas within its borders — but they’re not Muslim caliphates, they’re Native American reservations.
“We’re not talking about social issues, we’re not talking about poverty, we’re talking about [how] you cannot have a country within a country,” King said. “Especially when that country is hostile. And that’s what this is. It’s a hostile population.”