Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)

(CNSNews.com) – The controversial new president of the Philippines has accused the United States of “importing terrorism” from the Middle East through its policies in the region.

“It is not that the Middle East is exporting terrorism to America,” he told a Muslim audience on Friday night. “America imported terrorism.”

In a provocative and rambling speech, President Rodrigo Duterte also suggested the Philippines had been at peace until the arrival of European explorers in the 16th century led to forced conversions of Muslims, with Christianity “rammed down their throats.” He attributed differences between Muslims and Christians there to colonialism, adding, “and that is what is happening in the Middle East.”

The Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country with a large Muslim minority in the southern Mindanao region, is a close U.S. ally and aid recipient.

It received $236.8 million in U.S. aid in fiscal year 2015, and the administration plans $184 million in aid in FY 2016 and $188 million in FY 2017.

Duterte, a former mayor of Davao City in Mindanao who was elected by a landslide last May, is notorious for provocative, vulgar and misogynistic rhetoric, including threats to murder criminals.

Addressing an end-of-Ramadan Eid al-Fitr celebration in Mindanao, he suggested that members of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group operating in the southern Philippines behave as they do because they were “driven to desperation” and radicalized. He said he would not lump them together with criminals.

(The al-Qaeda-linked group’s long and bloody campaign has included the beheadings of dozens of hostages, including Catholic priests and nuns. It has also kidnapped and murdered Americans.)

Duterte then implied that, similarly, terrorists in the Middle East have been “pushed to the wall.”

America and Britain, he said in a mixture of English and Tagalog/Filipino, “forced their way to Iraq and killed Saddam. Look at Iraq now. Look what happened to Libya. Look what happened to Syria.”

“It is not that the Middle East is exporting terrorism to America,” he said. “America imported terrorism.”

Although Saddam had been a dictator, Duterte said, he had at least kept the country under control.

Pointing to the recently-released British inquiry into the Iraq war, he said, “after a thorough, almost ten-year investigation, it turns out there was not legal basis to declare war against Iraq,” adding that it had been “a useless war.”

Under then-President Gloria Arroyo, the Philippines was a strong supporter of the U.S. in its post-9/11 campaign against Islamic terrorism, a relationship which in 2003 won it the same “major non-NATO ally” status as is enjoyed by such close allies as Australia and Japan.

Arroyo publicly backed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, and later contributed troops to the coalition. In mid-2004 she withdrew the 51-strong troop contingent, however, in exchange for the release of a Filipino civilian held hostage in Iraq and threatened with death.

The two countries hold regular joint military exercises, and in 2014 they signed a 10-year agreement allowing for a rotating American military presence in the south-east Asian country.

The Philippines has looked for – and received – U.S. for support in its territorial dispute with China over resource-rich areas of the South China Sea.

After his election in May Duterte said his foreign policy would not be dependent on the U.S., but that he would pursue “a line that is not intended to please anybody but the Filipino interest,” Reuters reported.

Addressing the Eid event the president, who received a Catholic education, said, “I’m not a Christian actually.” He added, however, that he did believe in God, whom he repeatedly called “Allah” – to the evident delight of his Muslim listeners.