The Unconscionable And Dishonest Attacks On Sebastian Gorka

Only two weeks ago Eli Lake published an article which made the case that getting rid of Mike Flynn was simply the first blow in a long term strategy to bring down Trump’s presidency.

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

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In the end, it was Trump’s decision to cut Flynn loose. In doing this he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end well. “First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.

Indeed. You can probably lump the silly and largely misogynistic attack on Kellyanne Conway yesterday into this. One thing for certain, the character assassination being waged against Sebastian Gorka is definitely part of the Obama-loyalist scheme to ensure that virtually nothing changes. Where Flynn threatened to shake up the intel community, so too Gorka threatens to shake up the Islam-appeasement faction in US foreign policy.

If you aren’t familiar with Gorka, he is an NSC staff member and deputy assistant to the president on counterterrorism. He is widely disliked by the Washington foreign policy community because he believes Islam, itself, is a significant part of the problem in Islamic terrorism. Because of this he has come under a barrage of scurrilous attacks by they same people who were after Mike Flynn’s scalp. Via Andy McCarthy:

They’ve taken down General Michael Flynn. The former Trump national-security adviser resigned under fire when a false narrative — his purported collusion with election-hacking Russians — was inflamed by criminal intelligence leaks, exacerbated by his poor judgment (or, at the least, poor execution of his duty to brief senior administration officials). Now, the swamp is after its next scalp, Sebastian Gorka, a White House counterterrorism adviser. If the White House is wise, they won’t get it.

Seb is a friend of mine. He is also an accomplished scholar of jihadist ideology and methodology. A series of transparently coordinated hit pieces against him has issued from the usual mainstream-media sources. They have been ably rebutted, among other places, here at National Review Online, in a column by Colin Dueck, and at the Washington Free Beacon, in reports by Bill Gertz and Adam Kredo. The notion that he is racist, “Islamophobic” (as opposed to anti-jihadist), or uninformed is absurd. I wish only to add a couple of observations to the mix.

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Gorka, an American citizen who grew up in London and holds a doctorate in political science from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration, is an outside-the-Beltway academic. His clear-eyed understanding of totalitarian ideology, as we shall see, is largely based on having experienced its wages. In short, he is a gate-crasher who does not share the industry’s presumptions. Worse, from the industry’s perspective, he is an extraordinarily effective speaker and writer, who connects well in the classroom, on the page, in the council hall, and at the television studio. He is anathema to an expert class that has spent years willingly putting itself in the service of such farce as “countering violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” “Arab Spring,” “religion of peace,” and other manifestations of willful blindness.

There is thus a target on his back. The Trump administration’s quick cashiering of General Flynn has convinced establishment Washington that it may not take much character assassination for the next guy to be thrown under the proverbial bus.

Some of the attacks on Gorka have been utterly ridiculous. A medal, awarded to his father for his anti-communist activities (see this by David Realboi), was claimed to mark him as a neo-nazi sympathizer.

Last week a liberal Jewish magazine, Forward, published a hit piece that claimed Gorka had nebulous ties to Hungarian anti-semitic groups. But it was batted down by people actually familiar with what happened.

Indeed, writing at The Hill, European Union commissioner Tibor Navracsics—who has known Gorka for decades—defended him as “a man who has spent his life battling fascists and anti-Semites of all sorts.” Monday also saw prominent Washington voices lining up to support Gorka’s character against the smears, including Democrat Josh Block of the Israel Project, and Matt Brodsky, formerly of the Jewish Policy Center.

And as Realboi notes in his exhaustive must-read, Gorka was actively involved in trying to minimize the influence of anti-semitic elements in the right of Hungarian politics.

We are going to see this pattern continue for several months as the Obama resistance tries to strip out new players and replace them with the same old worn out retreads that shuffle, zombie-like, from one administration to another. Gorka is a game changer for the West on terrorism. And, as Andy McCarthy says, there are a lot of people with major investments in the status quo. Gorka and others like him are a threat that must be destroyed.

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