The way al-Qaeda tells it, the West is locked in an existential war with Islam. This is how the terrorist group justifies its violence and its fundamentalist ideology. And now it has found a Westerner to back them up — top Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Bannon graced the cover (above the fold!) of the most recent al-Qaeda-linked Al Masra newspaper. That prominence, University of Oxford researcher Elisabeth Kendall told Quartz, is “striking.” The piece focused on Bannon's views of Islam, saying he believes that “the forces of Islam cannot be stopped by peaceful means.”
The paper cited a conversation Bannon had with a Danish journalist in May 2016. It also claimed that Bannon believes that the struggle is really between Christianity and Islam, not just Islam and the West. And it suggested that Bannon has “lost confidence in secular Europe, and sees Muslim immigrants as partially responsible for the retreat of traditional Christian values.
”Like other Trump advisers (and former advisers), Bannon has spoken publicly about these beliefs. In 2014, he gave a speech to the Vatican via Skype in which he said, “We’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of global war against Islamic fascism.” On other occasions, he's suggested that the “Judeo-Christian West” is at war with “expansionist Islamic ideology.”
I don't think it takes a terrorism expert to realize that Donald Trump and his Islamophobic advisors are doing nothing to actually fight terrorism, but quite a lot to inspire future terrorist attacks against the United States.
The war in Iraq did a great job of incentivizing up and coming Jihadists, despite Bush's attempts to argue that the war was not based on religion, but Donald Trump and his advisors are not even attempting to to do that much and with their rhetoric and policy choices seem to be turning Anti-Islamic sentiment up to eleven.
In short any future terrorist attacks in this country can most likely be linked right back to Donald Trump and his merry band Muslim bashers.
Source http://ift.tt/2mshYOX
