As he continues to increasingly comment on foreign policy issues in preparation for a possible run at the White House in 2016, Gov. Bobby Jindal is planning to wade into a highly controversial issue regarding Muslims in Europe during an address Monday in London.
As USA Today reports, Jindal—who began a 10-day trade mission to Europe last weekend—will reiterate in his address a disputed claim that Muslim immigrants have created “no-go zones” in Europe where non-Muslims are not welcome. An advance text of Jindal’s speech, circulated by his office, warns that Islamic radicals are fomenting anti-Western sentiment in “no-go zones” where they rule themselves by Islamic religious law, not the laws of their host nations.
“In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home,” Jindal’s text reads. “It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so-called ‘no-go zone.’ The idea that a free country would allow for specific areas of its country to operate in an autonomous way that is not free and is in direct opposition to its laws is hard to fathom.”
The “no-go zones” theory became a bit of an international incident as Jindal prepared to depart for Europe last weekend, when Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism said on Fox News that in parts of France, Britain, Sweden and Germany, Muslim immigrants have set up enclaves where the host nations “don’t exercise any sovereignty.” He added that in the United Kingdom there are even entire cities—specifically the city of Birmingham, “where non-Muslims simply don’t go in.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron responded by saying: “When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot.”
Emerson posted an apology to Birmingham on his organization’s website, but he did not retract the other portions of his Fox News interview. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a U.S.-based Muslim civil rights group, says “This whole bogus notion of no-go zones in Europe has been floating around in right wing anti-Muslim circles for years … but they can’t provide evidence for any of the them.”
As evidence of the existence of “no-go zones,” Jindal’s office cited blog posts from the Gatestone Foundation, which is chaired by former State Department official John Bolton. Bolton’s group argues that “the ‘no-go’ areas are the byproduct of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.” Read the full story.
