The former deputy undersecretary of defense under George H.W. Bush said he is skeptical President Donald Trump's new national security adviser will work out because of his belief terrorists are not radical Islamists.
Jed Babbin told Newsmax TV's "America Talks Live" decorated Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster cannot coexist with Trump without compromising Trump's hard-line anti-terror campaign promises.
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"[Trump] promised to defeat Islamic terrorism," Babbin, a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, told host Steve Malzberg. "He promised to defeat the Islamic ideology. Now you have Gen. McMaster who may be a very nice guy, but I'm terribly skeptical of him.
"He's basically said that terrorists are not Islamic. Well, frankly, I beg to differ, and so do all the experts, the non-Muslim experts that I talk to about the Quran.
"They are very convinced that the Islamic terrorists are the most Islamic that you can get. They are frankly as equally founded in the Quran as any other part of Muslim beliefs."
McMaster reportedly told members of the National Security Council last week he felt "radical Islamic terrorism" was not a productive way to describe terrorism and becoming a terrorist is "un-Islamic" in itself, The New York Times and The Guardian reported.
People at the Thursday meeting say McMaster also declared he was "not on board" in using the term, which appears to dismiss "an entire religion."
Babbin disagrees.
"Well, they are Islamic, and McMaster is just dead-bang wrong on that and, again, the basic problem we have here is we cannot win the war against terrorists, against Islamic terrorism unless we defeat their ideology," he told Malzberg.
"You have to defeat them kinetically, in the fighting war, in the shooting war, but you also have to destroy their ideology, because no matter how many of these guys you kill, there'll be more that pop up with the same ideology propelled by the same part of their religion.
"And I'm not saying it's a perverted part of the religion. There again McMaster is wrong. This is not a perversion of Islam, it is one of the principle teachings of Islam."
Babbin is author of "The BDS War Against Israel: The Orwellian Campaign to Destroy Israel Through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement," written with Herbert London and published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
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