Katrina Pierson, a national spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, addressed concerns about Trump’s proposal for a ban on Muslim immigration on Friday by saying such a ban would not be “religious discrimination” because you don’t “have the freedom to kill Americans just because it’s based on your religion.” She added that any Muslim “can just flip into a jihadist” and that Americans victimized by Islamist terrorism are now being “criminalized.”
“It’s absolutely not religious discrimination,” Pierson told One American News Network’s Liz Wheeler , because one of the things that we keep hearing is that it’s not constitutional, it’s un-American, etc., etc., freedom of religion. But I have to tell you, I’m not sure that anyone in this country agrees that you have the freedom to kill Americans just because it’s based in your religion.”
Pierson then linked Trump’s proposal to the American lives lost in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “But more importantly,” she said, “this was a ban simply on immigration coming in as a Muslim. We all know that Muslims are not hostile, all of them. However, we also know that they are killing Americans in the name of Islam and we have to take that seriously. And what I don’t understand is that since 9/11, we have the Iraq War, we have the fight in Afghanistan, that’s 10,000 American lives, and we still have a porous border, we haven’t reformed the visa system, and just when we had the San Bernardino attacks, he was radicalized for a couple of years and she came in on a visa and passed with flying colors.”
“I’m not quite sure why there’s this real big push to sort of cover the hostility that comes within the faith of Islam,” Pierson added later in the interview. “We have two sides of this coin. We have the ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ but, at the same time, all of the sudden the same people can just flip into a jihadist. We have to figure this out one way or another because one thing we can no longer continue to do is allow Americans to be attacked on their own soil and then be criminalized afterwards.”
