Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton discussed the potential designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
Noting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps may also receive such a designation, Bolton said that “those would be two excellent steps forward.”
“You can also see already, in the Washington Post and other mainstream media this morning, the effort by the bureaucracy to push back on that – arguments that if you designate the Muslim Brotherhood, you’ll stimulate extremism in the Muslim world,” he said. “It’s a typical example of seizing on something that could be used as a pretext and acting like it’s an underlying cause.”
“The fact is, the Brotherhood is a front for terrorism,” he argued. “A number of Arab majority-Muslim countries, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have already designated it as a terrorist organization. I’ve had Muslim leaders from the Middle East say to me, ‘Are you people blind to what’s going on right in front of you and the role that the Brotherhood performs, really on an international basis?’”
“As for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, not only is Iran itself the central banker of international terrorism, but the Guards are the source of much of the arming, training, and equipping of terrorist groups around the world. They obviously control the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Not only are they key to protecting the Ayatollah’s regime; they’re also big businessmen. So designating the Guards would have a significant impact on Iran, and I think help contribute to make it very clear that what National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said a few days ago – that Iran was ‘on notice’ that the Obama nuclear deal was in deep trouble. That would be a very palpable way of showing just how much trouble it’s in,” he said.
Bolton was not surprised that the IRGC was under consideration for a terrorist designation in addition to the Brotherhood.
“It’s very consistent with what Trump said during the campaign about his opposition to terrorism, his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal,” he said. “There’s been legislation pending. I think Ted Cruz introduced a bill that would have designated the Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization. I think there would be very broad support for it in Congress.”
“It shows, really, why the Iran nuclear deal was not sustainable from the outset, for reasons having nothing to do with the fact it didn’t address the nuclear program; it gave Iran loopholes to drive trucks through. The fact is Iran, even to this day, even under Obama, is still designated by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. To me, that means their word on anything like nuclear weapons, that could be given ultimately to terrorist groups, simply can’t be taken as having any meaning,” said Bolton.
“Not only is Iran itself a state sponsor of terrorism; it is a terrorist and deserves to be treated as such,” he declared.
John Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and heads his own political action committee, BoltonPAC.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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