Controversial Trump Adviser Crows Over "Radical Islamic Terrorism" Line in Speech
Sebastian Gorka, the White House foreign policy adviser who works for strategist Steve Bannon, has been crowing about three words Donald Trump uttered in his speech to Congress Tuesday:
"Radical Islamic terrorism."
"After 8 years of obfuscation and disastrous Counterterrorism policies those 3 words are key to Victory against Global Jihadism," Gorka tweeted Tuesday.
Gorka has yet to address the fact that in his own PhD dissertation in 2007, he argued against putting a religious label on extremism. Doing so, he wrote, would do "a great disservice to law-abiding Muslims everywhere and also add an undeserved sense of quasi-religious legitimacy to murderous terrorists that have little in common with the teachings of the Koran or Mohammed."
Leaving that aside, it's clear Gorka and his allies won a policy victory over others, including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who advised Trump that associating Islam with terrorism plays into the hands of the enemy by risking alienating peaceful, law-abiding Muslims. Bannon and Gorka argue the opposite: That the U.S. must proclaim to the world that jihadi terrorism springs from a faction within the religion itself, thereby helping moderates win what they call the war within Islam.
Asked about McMaster's widely reported views on NPR Tuesday morning, Gorka responded that McMaster never said such things.