When talking about the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, American presidents are traditionally
very careful to differentiate between the vast majority who practice the religion peacefully
and the small minority who don't.
There's nothing in there, in Islam that condones the kind of brutality that we've seen
Our actions today were not aimed against Islam, the faith of hundreds of millions of good,
peace-loving people.
We are not at war with Islam, we are at war with those who have perverted Islam.
President Donald Trump has not continued this tradition.
Do you think Islam is at war with The West?
I think Islam hates us.
There’s something, there's something there that’s a tremendous hatred.
To understand why Trump is breaking with his predecessors, you have to understand his chief
strategist, Steve Bannon.
Before he joined the Trump campaign, Bannon ran the far-right website Breitbart, where
he hosted a daily radio show.
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.
Islam is peace.
If you listen to Bannon's radio show, and watch his speeches, you start to get a sense
of how he sees the world.
Bannon believes that the US and Western Europe are in the middle of an historical struggle
against Islam itself.
Bannon isn’t talking about the American founding fathers, he’s talking about European
leaders who fought off Muslim conquests in the 8th and 16th centuries.
That is the context in which Bannon approaches policy today
This context also helps us understand Bannon's views about refugees from the muslim world.
In a 2015 interview, Bannon and then-Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana discussed Obama’s
plan to take in10,000 refugees from Syria.
Bannon seems to think Syrian refugees are incapable of adapting to the American way
of life.
Before Breitbart, Bannon made documentary films.
In the outline for one film, which he didn't end up making, Bannon warns of an Islamist
takeover of the United States.
The opening scene features the call to prayer and a flag of the Muslim star and crescent
flying over the U.S. capitol building.
Though his current focus is on Muslims, Bannon has expressed a desire to keep all foreign-born
people out of the U.S.
In a 2015 interview, he disagreed when Donald Trump
said we should keep high-skilled immigrants in the US.
Less than 14% of Silicon Valley CEOs are Asian.
But the fake statistic supports his view: that legal immigrants are just as problematic
if not more, than those who are here illegally.
The number is closer to 13 percent, but Bannon’s point is that
immigrants somehow make America less American.
He believes they don’t share American values, and that, even when here legally, they take jobs
away from native-born Americans.
And, in this view, Bannon is way out of sync with mainstream Republicans,
who, along with business interests like the Chamber of Commerce, have long said they welcome
legal immigrants.
We're gonna need more legal immigration.
Immigrants are an economic engine of vitality for our country, they make things happen.
We need to figure out how to have more legal immigration.
Immigrants are the lifeblood of our society.
I think probably, you know, the most dedicated Americans are those who come here as immigrants.
Bannon blames legal immigrants for what he describes as a bleak economic landscape for
native-born Americans.
If you’re under 30 years old, your children are going to be poor, and your grandchildren
are going to be paupers.
The only way to stop this from happening, Bannon says, is to rise up against those whom
he calls the ruling political class, those who allow immigration, legal and illegal,
to continue.
Think about it.
If the elites are so good, how did we get in this jam?
This is the fourth great crisis in American history: we had the Revolution, we had the
Civil War, we had the Great Depression and World War II, this is the great fourth turning
in American history
Bannon’s views have already started to influence policy.
Multiple news outlets have confirmed that he was behind the executive order temporarily
banning travelers from 7 majority-muslim countries and almost all refugees from entering the
US.
A federal judge has temporarily halted the ban, but with the president’s ear, and a
seat on the National Security Council, Bannon's vision of a closed America, at war
with Islam will continue to influence policy.