Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is not backing away from the disputed claim that police in European cities have abandoned segregated Muslim neighborhoods, allowing them to morph into "no-go" zones that serve as terrorist breeding grounds for their unassimilated, alienated residents,
CNN reports.
Jindal, a Republican widely viewed as a potential candidate for president in 2016, was in London this week to talk about foreign policy, and on Monday he criticized the existence of Muslim no-go zones in a speech to a British think tank.
Jindal appeared to be repeating a similar charge about a British city, Birmingham, made on Jan. 11 by a Fox News contributor, security analyst (and Newsmax contributor)
Steve Emerson, even though Emerson later apologized for the claim and Fox News issued a thorough retraction.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said that he "choked on his porridge" when he heard about Emerson's depiction of Birmingham as "totally Muslim" and governed by imams under Sharia law,
"This guy is clearly a complete idiot," he said of Emerson.
Jindal stuck to the claim in two CNN follow-up interviews after his speech and said that leftist critics were trying to accuse him of attacking Islam.
"Look, I've heard it from folks here: There are neighborhoods where women don't feel comfortable going in without veils. That is wrong," Jindal told British CNN correspondent Max Foster. "We all know there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into."
"You need to have proper sort of facts to back that up," Foster retorted. "I've lived here a long time. I don't know of any no-go zones."
"Well I did say 'so-called no-go zones' [in the speech], and I think that the radical left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem's not here," Jindal replied. "Pretending it's not here won't make it go away."
Later on to CNN host Wolf Blitzer, Jindal said, "Look I know by speaking the truth, we were going to make people upset," and he pointed to a London tabloid report on high crime in Muslim communities as evidence.
"Even today in
the Daily Mail, you had a local police chief admit that there are no-go zones in London," Jindal told Blitzer.
"Look, I know the left wants to make this an attack on religion, and that's not what this is," said Jindal. "What we're saying is it absolutely is an issue for the U.K., it absolutely is an issue for America and other European and Western nations."
He also said critics want to obscure his larger point — that allowing immigrants to live in a Western country without requiring them to adopt its core values is "dangerous."
"Radical Islamists hate our values. They threaten our way of life," Jindal told Blitzer. "They don't condone — they don't allow freedom of expression, self determination."
"The fact that you've got people that want to come to our country but not adopt our values, in same cases not adopt our language, in some cases want to set apart their own enclaves and continue to hold on to their own values — I think that's dangerous," he said.
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