Dr. Sebastian Gorka on Fox News: White House Must Fight Idea that ‘Jihadism is Cool’

On Fox & Friends Sunday Morning, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Breitbart National Security contributor and Major General Horner Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, confronted repeated statements by the Obama administration conflating jihadism with generic extremism, objecting that to defeat an enemy is to ultimately defeat their ideology.

Discussing the attacks on a military recruiting office and training facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last week, Dr. Gorka noted that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had referred to the incident as “a senseless act of violence,” which Dr. Gorka noted was “dead wrong.” “This is a very logical, rational part on the global jihadi movement’s assault on America and everything that is good,” he clarified, adding that “the frontline of this war is here on American soil, as well,” not just in Middle Eastern jihadi strongholds.

The gunman in the Chattanooga attack, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, sent a text message quoting an Islamic verse, or Hadith, to a friend before going on the shooting spree, reading: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, I will indeed declare war against him.”

In addition to the physical front lines in America, the hosts and Dr. Gorka discussed the virtual front lines of the War on Terror, where the battle to attract young minds between jihadists and Western law enforcement rages. Dr. Gorka described the cultural battle between radical Islamists and the governments of the West as “the heart of the matter.” “We are only going to win this war when we take down this ideology, the idea that jihadism is cool.”

The solution, Dr. Gorka concluded, was to confront the threat head-on and to target and diffuse potential problems before they start. “Use the people in the communities to identify potential radicals,” he advised. Confronting the problem also requires simply naming it, something the White House has been reluctant to do. Noting a recent summit by the Obama administration meant to target generic “violent extremism,” Dr. Gorka noted, “it is not violent extremism, it is global jihadism… and we have to talk about it honestly.” Imagine, he posits, a world in which World War II soldiers were told “‘don’t say the word ‘Nazi’ because you could offend some Germans’… you cannot allow politics into the threat assessment.”

Watch the segment from this morning’s Fox & Friends below:

You can also watch Dr Gorka’s full Heritage Foundation brief on why ISIS is more dangerous than Al Qaeda here and follow him on Twitter @SebGorka.