“Drive out the terrorists. Drive out the extremists. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land and drive them out of this Earth.”
WASHINGTON – Delivering his first major foreign policy address since taking office, US President Donald Trump told Arab world leaders gathered in Riyadh on Sunday that he considers Islam a fundamentally peaceful religion, but that extremist elements within it are holding their nations back, and that force must be used to drive out heretics of the faith. At times, Trump sought to distance himself from rhetoric that defined his presidential campaign and so concerned the very leaders sat before him. After claiming “Islam hates us” in a press interview last year, he told the Riyadh gathering of more than 50 heads of state that Islam is in fact “one of the world’s great faiths.” Trump appealed several times to moderate regional leaders as the true mantle bearers of a religion he has repeatedly disparaged wholesale.
