On Saturday in South Carolina, Louisiana Governor and potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal accused President Barack Obama of trying to turn the American Dream into the “European nightmare.”
Speaking at the Freedom Summit, which was sponsored by Citizens United and Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Jindal told voters in the first-in-the-South primary state that the “greatest threat we face from the Obama administration” is “what he is doing to redefine the idea of America, the idea of the American Dream.”
Jindal said after dividing Americans by “race, gender, geography,” Obama is trying to redefine the American Dream “into one about dependence, about government growth, about government spending.”
He accused Obama of wanting to make “us sound more and more like Europe” and said Obama’s left-leaning policies make it seem like he is intent on turning “the American Dream into the European nightmare.”
Jindal cited radical Islamic terrorism as an external threat and the assault on religious liberty at home as an internal threat that must be confronted so that America does not fundamentally transform and remains the country his immigrant father loved so much that he told Jindal to pray each day and thank God “that you were blessed to be born in the greatest country in the history of the world.”
Regarding radical Islamic terrorism, Jindal said “for some reason we have a president who doesn’t even like to use those words to discuss the enemy that we face.” After saying he was thankful that the two terrorists who opened fire last week in Garland Texas at a Mohammed cartoon exhibit that celebrated free speech were “sent to their afterlife,” Jindal said that Muslim leaders have an obligation to denounce individual terrorists by name and make it clear that they are not martyrs who will enjoy rewards in the afterlife but rather “will go straight to hell, where they belong.” He also called on Muslim leaders to declare that they “tolerate and respect the freedoms of others with religious beliefs different from their own.”
“It is not racist, anti-Muslim to demand that these leaders condemn terrorists, these thugs, these evil, evil individuals,” Jindal said, noting that the left likes to denounce anyone critical of radical Islam as being intolerant or insensitive.
Jindal also said the “assault on religious liberty we see taking place across the entire country” must be stopped. Citing the Hobby Lobby case, Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, and recent religious freedom cases in Indiana and Arkansas, Jindal said “there are no other freedoms without religious liberty” and blasted the left for “trying to silence us” and prevent Americans from living “our lives according to our faith, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
“The United States of America did not create religious liberty,” he said. “Religious liberty created the United States of America.”
He told the story of his immigrant parents who went from India to Baton Rouge and said he was tired of “hyphenated-Americans.” Jindal said people should be referred to as Americans instead of Indian-Americans, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, etc. He noted that his mother told him that she would have stayed in India if she wanted to raise Jindal as an Indian or an Indian-American and said his mother “came here to be an American.”
“If we stay united, nobody can beat us,” he said.