Erik Prince, managing director of the Frontier Resource Group, and a former Navy SEAL who helped found the famous Blackwater security contracting firm, appeared on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM to talk about the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East, Africa and, increasingly, in Europe.
“Radical Islam is on the march in many places around the world,” Prince warned. “Whether you start in East Africa, in Somalia, Somalia spilling over into Kenya, total chaos in Central African Republic, the eastern DRC… Nigeria, of course, has a terrible problem with Boko Haram, that literally means ‘Western education is prohibited,’ anything Western, including Christianity. Of course Libya, terrible failed state. Egypt, the entire Levant, everything from Lebanon to Syria. Iraq, of course, the ongoing Christian persecution — genocide — occurring there.”
He compared the situation in the Middle East to the Thirty Years War of European history, which had “religious overtones, Catholic versus Protestant, political overtones… and you have that now in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia Islam, radical Islam from both of those sects hates Christianity, hates Judaism, hates any other organized religion, and attacks it without limit.”
Without adequate legal protection in much of the Middle East, Prince said Christian communities are being crushed between the “plate tectonics” of the Sunni-Shia civil war. He noted that most secular leaders in the Middle East are preoccupied with “staying in power and keeping their borders intact,” so “the last thing on their minds are Christians.”
Prince warned those besieged Christians not to expect much help from the nominally Christian nations of the Western world, particularly under the current U.S. Administration.
“Europe, as you see, can’t deal with radical Islam. It is really still not even embracing the reality of the threats they face, and so they’re backing up, not going forward,” he said. “So Christians are very much left to themselves, and truly, it’s not just Christians. Of course, they’re going to suffer the most, because no one’s really helping them, other than a few Christian groups in the United States.”
SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon noted these ancient Christian communities in the Middle East had survived some of history’s most destructive forces storming through the region, but “it seems like they might not survive” radical Islam. He asked Prince if this outcome was foreseen when military operations were launched against Islamist forces after 9/11.
“Clearly it wasn’t,” Prince replied, “and I don’t believe it was going to have the second- and third-order effects that it has, or the enduring chaos. Tipping over secular strongmen created a vacuum that’s been filled by the hardest of hard-core of religious zealotry, which seeks to exterminate any other belief system that it encounters. It is the absolute of absolutism. And so, whereas before you might have other political forces or military forces that rolled through, and they let religions sit where they were, in this case it is such absolute religious fascism that it’s exterminating anything it touches.”
Another factor in the current wave of Middle Eastern violence, according to Prince, was the doubling of the “military-age male” population from about 15 million to 30 million, between 1995 and 2010. He noted that previous wars of attrition have not stopped until “the losing side lost at least 30 percent of its military-age male population,” causing them to reach “the point of exhaustion.” Militant Islam is nowhere near this point of exhaustion today.
“They say there is a ‘cease-fire’ in Syria right now. Malarkey,” scoffed Prince. “That is gonna burn on, and fester on – Sunni, Shia, super hard-core radical Daesh – that will continue burning until it burns itself out.”
He said the next U.S. Administration would be well-advised to “let Christians help Christians, and I mean really help them… and that means going shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and helping to defend their homelands. This is not a matter of sending blankets and clean water. They need physical security.”
Prince thought the current political structure of the Middle East was unlikely to survive the earthquake caused by those grinding “tectonic plates” of Islamic war.
“It’s time to pretty much redraw the map of the Middle East,” he said. “I don’t see Syria and Iraq ever going back together exactly the way it was written up by the Sykes-Picot treaty at the end of World War I: an arbitrary line drawn on a map to suit the needs of French and British colonial empire. So let there be a Christian homeland, or let there be a Christian region that’s part of a greater Kurdistan, or something. But give Christians a place to go, give them the means to defend themselves, and give them the means, again, to build a civil society.”
Prince suggested that relying on protection from governments like the al-Sisi regime in Egypt, which has made promises to Egyptian Christians and apologized for their persecution at the hands of Islamist forces like the Muslim Brotherhood, might be a mistake, as that regime is under attack from the Brotherhood, ISIS, al-Qaeda… and the U.S. State Department.
Prospects for the future are also uncertain in sub-Saharan Africa, where Christianity has been vibrant in recent years, but is under assault from Islamist dictatorships, and terrorist groups such as al-Shabaab in Somalia, which has launched bloody operations across the border into neighboring Kenya.
“It is direct, selective Christian slaughter,” Prince said of attacks such as al-Shabaab’s raid on a Nigerian university in Garissa, which killed 147 people. Unfortunately, outrage in the Western world against the slaughter of Christians is never sustained, so the same failed U.N. peacekeeping strategies grind on, year after year, creating a refugee crisis that is exporting Islamist pathologies to the West.
“Instead of putting out the fires where people live, so people can live in their homelands, we let these fires burn – call it the Powers-That-Be, the United States, the Europeans, all the people with the big nation-state militaries – don’t ever put the fire out, and that’s what’s causing all these refugee crises, and causing Christians living in those areas to be slaughtered,” said Prince.
He said radical Islam is “not out to win an intellectual debate, or a debate of faith. It is: you believe what I believe, or I’m going to cut your head off. It’s that absolute.”
“These psychopaths take explosives into an airport, and they think they’re serving their God and their cause by blowing up people for their alleged crime of riding the subway or getting on a commercial airplane,” Prince said of the Brussels bombings. “That’s the kind of insanity we’re dealing with, and there’s really no other way, when dealing with insanity, than to put a rabid dog down.”
The same could be said of Boko Haram in Nigeria, which Prince noted is trying to create its own “caliphate” ruled by Islamic law, patterned after the terror state created by their partners in ISIS. He compared their tactics of pillaging and looting to earlier historical menaces, such as the Huns and Mongols… combined with the enslavement and indoctrination tactics of the Islamic State, which have enabled Boko Haram to transform captive women and girls into brainwashed suicide bombers. Prince used them as another example of his thesis that Islamist radicalism thrives because major powers refuse to strike fatal blows against them.
“Again, the Nigerian government lacks the means, or the intensity, or capability to actually go into Sambisa Forest and clean it out, and to deny them sanctuary. And so they’re able to spread their terror into Cameroon, to the east, and to Niger to the north. They’ve been beaten back somewhat, but they’re still, in terms of total death count, they are the worst terrorist organization in the world,” he said.
Unfortunately, Prince warned that Islamists do understand the importance of striking fatal blows against Christianity, and other faith traditions in their path. This explains why, as Bannon observed, hardy Christian communities that survived the militantly atheist totalitarian horrors of the 20th Century are threatened with extinction by radical Islam in the 21st.
“I certainly believe Christianity will survive globally,” said Prince… but he quoted Scripture in noting that “the gates of hell are blowing hot right now” against Christian communities in the Middle East.
“It will make for a very, very few, but a very faithful few, who remain,” he predicted, and said it was incumbent on Western governments, as well as charitable private citizens, to defend those faithful few, lest they be driven out from their ancestral homes in a final purge.
With chemical and nuclear weapons coming into play, Prince warned that “this could spiral big and ugly, more quickly than we can imagine.”
Breitbart News Saturday is broadcast on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 10AM to 1PM EST.
You can listen to the full interview with Erik Prince below:
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