Conservative Pundit Sebastian Gorka Brings ‘Global Jihadist Movement’ Theory Into White House Critics say policy addressing terrorism primarily as a religious problem reinforces notion that U.S. is at war with Islam By Shane Harris
https://www.wsj.com/articles/conservative-pundit-sebastian-gorka-brings-global-jihadist-movement-theory-into-white-house-1487650120
In the days before President Donald Trump signed the Jan. 27 executive order blocking immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries, only a small circle of advisers reviewed the document.
One was Sebastian Gorka, a terrorism researcher and conservative pundit who has gone on to become the administration’s most visible and passionate defender of the ban and increasingly its go-to spokesman on national security issues.
“I’m not going to comment on whose hand was holding the pen,” Mr. Gorka said in an interview, declining to spell out whether he helped draft the immigration order. “I was asked to look at the executive order before it was signed by the president.”
That jihadist activity has been the focus of Mr. Gorka’s work for more than two decades. In blog posts and articles on Breitbart News and elsewhere, in TV appearances and lectures, as well as in a book published last year, he has described a theory of terrorism that he calls the “global jihadist movement,” which he says takes its marching orders from the Quran and from manifestos by militants and terrorist leaders.
Mr. Gorka has now taken that view into the center of power at the White House, where he is part of the new White House Strategic Initiatives Group. He said he reports to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff; and Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist.
The Strategic Initiatives Group has been described by some U.S. officials and experts as a parallel National Security Council, writing executive orders with relatively little input from policy officials and subject matter experts. This organization has posed an impediment to Mr. Trump’s efforts to fill the position of national security adviser, with at least two candidates turning down the job because the president wouldn’t give them control over staffing, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.
Mr. Gorka is a rhetorical pugilist, and his eagerness to confront the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies has made him a fixture on conservative talk shows and a frequent lecturer to law enforcement and military groups. He attracted the attention of the Trump campaign, which paid him $8,000 in 2015 for policy consulting, federal records show.
But Mr. Gorka also has turned some leading counterterrorism experts and scholars against him because of what they see as his singular focus on Islam as the motivation for terrorism.
“I don’t see him in the mainstream of counterterrorism scholars, and he would also make himself out not to be in the mainstream,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former Army officer and FBI special agent. To Mr. Watts and some other experts, Mr. Gorka has bundled disparate groups working at cross-purposes—including Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah—under his single umbrella of global jihad.
In Mr. Gorka’s worldview, they say, violence is a feature of Islam, not a bug. And his insistence that U.S. policy address terrorism primarily as a religious problem, rather than as the result of overlapping factors such as poverty, social immobility, or lack of education, will reinforce the notion that the U.S. is at war with Islam, an idea that two previous presidential administrations strove to combat, his critics say.
To Mr. Gorka’s supporters, that focus on the religious roots of terrorism is precisely what’s been lacking for nearly a decade.
“What he does focus on, which is 180 degrees from the last administration, is the war of ideas,” said James Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who said he has known Mr. Gorka for about 15 years. “I think the notion that we can fight the ideology without discussing and referencing the religion is kind of ridiculous. It’s like combating communism without discussing Karl Marx,” Mr. Carafano said.
The jihadist movement, Mr. Gorka writes in his book “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War,” includes terrorist groups with different goals that hail from different religious sects. But they share “a vision of the future world that is exclusive and absolutist,” he writes. “Either the whole planet is under their control or they have lost. There is no middle ground.”
“America and her allies are in a war with people who do what they do to please their God and obtain salvation by serving him as warriors,” Mr. Gorka wrote in a 2015 post for Breitbart, a site popular with the alt-right, a loose agglomeration of far-right groups that embrace tenets of white supremacy or say they reject mainstream conservatism.
Mr. Gorka bemoaned, as he frequently does, the Obama administration’s approach to countering radical ideology. “Washington summits and more community outreach will not stop the next attack against the Homeland,” he wrote then.
Some experts see a troubling trend, with Mr. Gorka joining other hard-liners in key security posts.
“The [Trump] administration’s enlistment of Gorka and others who possess, at most, junior-level expertise with these terrorist elements and relevant issues could very well blow up in all our faces,” said Michael S. Smith II, a Republican counterterrorism specialist who said he voted for Mr. Trump and has advised members of Congress. “He basically tries to lump things together into one big problem instead of distinguishing among doctrines.”
Mr. Gorka is not lacking in credentials. After earning his Ph.D. in political science in Budapest, he held teaching and lecturer positions at the Joint Special Operations University, the National Defense University, and the Marine Corps University, spokesmen for those organizations confirmed. Students at the Marine Corps University said they enjoyed his classes and Mr. Gorka’s personnel file contains no complaints about his course materials or teaching style, said John Sachrison, the chief operating officer of a foundation that raised the money for Mr. Gorka’s position.CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
