Columnist David Reaboi joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his column rebutting the left-wing Forward’s latest attempt to smear Dr. Sebastian Gorka – deputy adviser to President Trump and former Breitbart News National Security editor – as an anti-Semite.
“The backstory is that this all started at the very beginning of the Trump administration, with a lengthy oppo dump by Eli Clifton, who is a former Center for American Progress staffer. He was writing at LobeLog, which is an anti-Israel blog,” Reaboi explained. “He laid out basically the fruits of some opposition research that was done on Seb Gorka, who as you know is a former Breitbart guy and friend of mine, and now a deputy assistant to the president for counterterrorism.”
“From there the Forward picked it up and – I’m not kidding you, they’ve done about 30 pieces over the last six weeks,” he said. “That’s a lot of time and energy and effort directed at hammering Seb over this stuff, and one allegation is thinner than the next.”
“They really reached a new low this past week when they put out a video of Seb in 2007 in Hungarian, in which they completely mistranslated the text. Now, it just so happens that I guess we lucked out, because not only am I a friend of Seb’s and a fellow counterterrorism expert, but I also speak Hungarian. So it was bad news for the Forward,” said Reaboi.
“We’re starting to get into serious money here,” he said of the assault on Gorka. “We’re talking about thousands of man-hours to do research, to do writing, to do multiple bylines. Somebody’s getting paid from this.”
Kassam noted that fundraising is also being done based on the Gorka smear effort, as can be seen by visiting Forward’s website.
“There’s a little splash page when you go to their website saying something like, ‘Help us take Dr. Gorka down. Donate five dollars here,’ right? Who does that? Scumbags,” Kassam said.
“Scumbags would be the nice word for it,” Reaboi agreed.
“They took an 11-minute video and the edited it into two minutes, and in so doing they did it with like 10 different edits,” Reaboi explained. “These are stealth edits, and it was done such that it looks like he’s saying – it looks coherent, but only if you really look at it and you see the full transcript, you can see what’s edited out.”
“For example, it begins without a question being asked. It begins mid-sentence,” he noted. “I had to look at it three or four times until I realized that they actually mistranslated him completely in Hungarian, because as an example, in Hungarian grammatically, you support and they support are the same. You have to see the context.”
Kassam summed up Forward’s approach by saying they clipped out everything negative Gorka said about the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary, transforming his analysis of their position into a statement of support.
“How did they get something so wrong, and do you think there is a case to be made by Dr. Sebastian Gorka on this, that this is outright libel?” he asked.
“If he was not a public figure, definitely,” Reaboi replied. “If he wasn’t a busy guy with a very public job, then definitely this is something that he could take them to court over. But because of his position, it’s really not an option.”
Kassam noted that the American Jewish Committee has apparently endorsed Forward’s reporting by calling for an investigation of Gorka.
“These guys are all partisan Democrats,” Reaboi noted. “It’s a sad state of affairs, but much of the organized Jewish establishment, if you will – professional Jews, the same way you have professional Christians and professional Muslims – a lot of those guys and women are now partisan Democrats. They’ve been very successful at this. You saw it with some senators who right away rushed out of the box to do this.”
“Look, it was coordinated because it’s coming from the Forward, which has this tradition as a quote-unquote ‘Jewish paper.’ They took the word ‘Jewish’ out of their name. The attacks originated at an anti-Israel blog. They were amplified by the Forward strategically, just so that they could make this point. It’s so cynical. It’s so cynical, man. It’s just crazy,” he lamented.
Speaking as “someone who is a Jew, who knows Seb and is familiar with the context of Hungarian politics and all this,” Reaboi repeated that it was insane to accuse Gorka of anti-Semitism.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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