Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon analyzed the dramatic weekend events in Saudi Arabia on Monday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on the SiriusXM Patriot Channel.
Bannon said a driving force behind the transformation of Saudi Arabia and other major events in the Middle East is the recognition by many regional powers that “President Trump and the United States of America have had enough of it and are just not going to tolerate anymore this financing, the exporting of radical Islamic terror into Western Europe and the United States.”
He recalled Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s giving a landmark speech several years ago about “how Islam had to reform itself internally to Islam, just like Christianity went through a huge reformation.”
“In fact, I think the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation was a couple of weeks ago,” he remarked. “Christianity had gone through things like the Thirty Years War and the Reformation, et cetera, to reform itself. By the way, I’m a Catholic, so I’m not saying everything in the Reformation was great.”
“My point is, these religions go through internal reformations: Gen. Sisi in Egypt, Mohammed bin Zayed in the United Arab Emirates, MBS, the new Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia. These guys have been at the forefront of trying to modernize and reform Islam internally, with Muslims doing their reformation,” said Bannon.
“One the things that you’ve seen at the summit President Trump had in the spring is that the United States is not prepared to tolerate any more people in the Middle East financing the exporting of radical Islamic terrorism into Western Europe in the United States. I think you’re seeing some of the leaders over there take active control of this,” he proposed.
“This was the whole thing I said at the Hudson Institute, that the Qatar situation is, I believe today – even with everything going on in the Northwest Pacific – the most important national security and foreign policy situation the United States has,” Bannon argued. “You can tell now with what’s happening with the Kurds and what’s happening in Turkey and Lebanon with the prime minister stepping down, thinking he could be assassinated. The Middle East, I’m telling you right now, is on a knife’s edge, in the last 48 or 72 hours.”
“And I’ve got to tell you, for all the elites out in the world, the Party of Davos guys are sitting there today gobsmacked, absolutely shocked,” he said. “The largest financier in the Arab world, the Muslim world, is Prince Alwaleed. He’s got stakes in just about every high-tech company. He’s a huge partner of Rupert Murdoch. When he came to the United States back in the early nineties, he was actually a client of my firm as he got into Hollywood; he got into media. He owns a huge stake in Citicorp, he saved Citicorp from going bankrupt.”
“People are stunned today that he was put under house arrest, put under arrest yesterday in Saudi Arabia, in this situation of what they called corruption, money laundering, et cetera. People are thinking this is directly tied to the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood, this whole thing about cleaning up Saudi Arabia to take care of this. You’re going to see a lot of changes. This thing is far, far from over. You’re at the top of the first inning. You’re probably at the first batter,” Bannon said.
“Look at what’s happening in Iraq now. Look at what’s happening with this expansionist Persia, Erdogan; John Bolton just said it. Erdogan is going to announce an Ottoman caliphate on the 100th anniversary of Ataturk. I’ve said it from day one: Erdogan is one of the most dangerous guys on the world stage. He believes in his heart that he’s a man of history. Those guys can be dangerous. We’ve got a mess in the Middle East, and President Trump, I think, has done a tremendous job of representing the vital national security interests of the United States over there,” he declared.
Bannon said that at President Trump’s summit meeting with dozens of Arab nations in Saudi Arabia, “modernization and reformation” were a big part of the agenda.
“MBS, the young Crown Prince, put this thing called Vision 2030 out there, which was to revitalize and change the economy. His point was, the oil is not going to be here forever. We have to do something to get ourselves off of oil. We have to make ourselves more productive. We have to become more engaged in technology, et cetera. Along those lines, he started to do some pretty fundamental things along with women’s rights, women’s empowerment in the modernization over there,” he recalled.
“I tell people, you’re not going to wave a wand or snap your fingers. It’s not going to happen immediately. But you’re seeing, I think, pretty big fundamental changes take place,” he said, noting the enthusiastic support President Trump expressed for those changes in his weekend phone call from Japan to Saudi King Salman.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.