On Fox News Monday, Breitbart News editor and Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University Dr. Sebastian Gorka argued that the war on jihad must be fought honestly, and those who deny the Islamic ideology behind attacks like that on Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Sunday morning are “in a fantasy land.”
The segment, preempting remarks by President Barack Obama in which he described the attack as an incident of “homegrown extremism,” focused on what the federal government and law enforcement need to do to unravel how Omar Mateen, 29, successfully executed the deadliest shooting in American history.
“There is no such thing” as a “lone wolf,” Dr. Gorka asserted, repeating his stance that the term is designed “to make Americans stupid.” No terrorist act occurs in a vacuum, he added, hoping that President Obama would state in his remarks something other than “what he usually says” — statements that divorce jihadist attacks from the ideology of jihad. “This is not a time for political correctness,” he added.
The challenge of preventing such acts is a prodigious one, Dr. Gorka noted. “It’s a big challenge, but we have some amazing people,” he said, arguing that the key to ending radical Islam in America is to foment human relationships with those who see the development of a planned jihadist attack and alert authorities in a timely manner. “We can’t win this by more data sets… we have to identify people in the community who can spot these events before they occur,” he added.
On the subject of the rights of individuals to be protected from unreasonable government surveillance — the “civil libertarian” argument, as host Bret Baier called it — both Dr. Gorka and fellow panelist former CIA director James Woolsey agreed that identifying the distinct threat of Islamic radicalism is necessary.
“The last 15 years, we haven’t had Episcopalian suicide bomber, we haven’t seen Zoroastrian mass murderers,” Gorka said. “We have seen Muslim extremists… if you deny that, you are in a fantasy land and you are endangering American citizens.”
Woolsey agreed. “Not talking about Islamic terrorists is like saying, ‘I’m not going to talk about the Spanish inquisition because people might think I am offending all Catholics,” he argued.
Watch the segment via Fox News below:
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