28 May, 2017
TEHRAN: Iran's newly re-elected President Hassan Rouhani ridiculed United States strategy in the Middle East, dismissing Donald Trump's summit with Arab leaders as "just a show" and insisting that missile tests will continue.
"The Americans have also made mistakes in their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as their stance on Syria and Yemen", he said.
"[Terrorists] do not worship God, they worship death", he told leaders of more than 50 Muslim-majority nations.
THEN: Trump declared in a March 2016 interview with CNN that, "I think Islam hates us" adding that, "there's a tremendous hatred there". "Trump chose, instead, to make his first presidential visit to an oligarchic kleptocracy which forces women to hide their faces and forbids them to travel without a male guardian's permission".
And because of other tensions in the region (with Iran) and tensions with previous US President Barack Obama, Trump is being given a pass on his past remarks and is being feted by the Saudi monarchy. In his speech, Trump said the agreements will "create many hundreds of thousands of jobs in America and Saudi Arabia".
Certainly the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has for years referred to terms like "Islamic terror" as prime examples of Western "Islamophobia".
When he was a candidate for president, Donald Trump's statements about Muslims frequently veered from the nonsensical to the offensive, venturing from time to time into the realm of the incoherent.
"The Americans do not know our religion, that's what the catch is", Rouhani said in response to a question from AP. "Anyone who can not condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president", he said.
At the end of his appearance with Netanyahu, Trump said that he "never mentioned the word or the name Israel" in his conversation with Russia's foreign minister and ambassador.
The advance excerpts of the speech had him saying "Islamist extremism".
Egypt, and numerous Arab Gulf states, have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood.
One group that did complain about Trump's speech was Hamas, the USA -designated foreign terrorist organization that was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 and seized control of the Gaza Strip a decade ago.
"If you look at what's happened Al-Qaeda Hezbollah, Hamas and so many others must be counted not only in the number of dead but it must be counted in generations of vanished dreams", Trump said.
Trump, who had previously suggested that it would be easier than anticipated to solve the conflict that has vexed his predecessors for decades, said that conditions were right in both Israel and the Arab world to strike what he has called "the ultimate deal".
