page_title: Sebastian Gorka
section_title: Views on Islam
hierarchical_section_title: Sebastian Gorka / Controversy / Views on Islam
caption_attribution_description: English: Sebastian Gorka presenting his testimony, "Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat," to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, June 22, 2011
context_page_description: Sebastian Lukács Gorka is a British-born Hungarian-American military and intelligence analyst, who served as a Deputy Assistant to the President in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. He served from January 2017 until August 25, 2017. He broadcasts a Salem Radio show. He was a Fox News contributor from 2017 to 2019.
  Gorka was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008, and in 2012 became a naturalized American citizen. Gorka has written for a variety of publications, is politically conservative and has ties to the alt-right, though he rejects the term, calling it "bogus" and "a new label for nationalists or irredentist bigots".
  During his time in the Trump administration, Gorka gave a series of combative interviews with the press in which he defended the administration's positions on national security and foreign policy. Various national security scholars in academic and policymaking circles have characterized Gorka as fringe. Some critics have challenged his academic credentials, his views on Islam and radicalization—as well as his motives for identifying with the Order of Vitéz or supporting the EU-banned Hungarian Guard.
context_section_description: Gorka's view on Islam and radicalization have drawn controversy. The New Yorker described his views as islamophobic. Gorka sees Islamic terrorism as essentially ideologically motivated and rooted in a totalitarian religious mindset. In his view, violence is a "fundamental" part of Islam, and he rejects other scholars' assessments that Islamic militancy stems primarily from poverty, poor governance, and war. He vigorously backed President Trump's two executive orders that temporarily banned entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and Trump's usage of the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism."
  According to Washington Post reporter Greg Jaffe, "Most counterterrorism experts dismiss Gorka's ideas as a dangerous oversimplification that could alienate Muslim allies and boost support for terrorist groups ... Religious scholars are equally withering." Additionally, according to Jaffe, Gorka's views "signal a radical break" from the discourse "defined by the city's Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite" of the last 16 years. For Gorka, "the terrorism problem has nothing to do with repression, alienation, torture, tribalism, poverty, or America's foreign policy blunders and a messy and complex Middle East", but is rooted in Islam and the "martial parts" of the Koran.
  In February 2017, former State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Daniel Benjamin and former National Security Council Senior Director Steven Simon took issue with Gorka's claim that the Obama and George W. Bush administrations had failed to understand the importance of ideology and they gave examples of how government analysts "going back nearly 40 years ha[d] examined ideology's role in Islamic militancy." They argued that by rejecting the role of "poor governance, repression, poverty and war" and failing to realize that "religious doctrine is not their sole or even primary driver", Gorka subscribed to an Islamophobic approach of seeing "Islam as the problem, rather than the uses to which Islam has been put by violent extremists."
  Others have noted additional nuance in Gorka's views about Islam. Freelance investigative journalist Richard Miniter attests that Gorka "has been emphatic that the enemy is not Islam" and that "there is an ideological war among Muslims, a small fraction of which side with al Qaeda and its ilk against the vast majority of Muslims, who are among the terrorists' most numerous victims." Andrew C. McCarthy says "The notion that he is racist, 'Islamophobic' (as opposed to anti-jihadist), or uninformed is absurd." McCarthy, a columnist for the National Review, describes Gorka's Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, a 2016 book published by conservative company Regnery Publishing, as a good "primer on the Islamic doctrinal and scholarly roots of jihadist terror," particularly "takfiri jihad" targeting fellow Muslims. Gorka believes that the jihadi threat is an ideological one that has to be addressed in manners similar to past totalitarian ideologies of the Cold War. According to him, it is crucial to empower Muslim allies, as this is a battle within Islam.
caption: Gorka testifying to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, regarding terrorism on June 22, 2011
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