Something in the attitude of CIA Director John Brennan has changed, Dr. Sebastian Gorka posited, for him to have publicly criticized the White House’s war on the Islamic State as having had little effect on diminishing the potency of the jihadi threat.
Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday night, Gorka noted that Brennan “used to carry the water for the president,” but “something has changed” following the attack on a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, by an Islamic State self-affiliated jihadi on Sunday.
Speaking before Congress on Thursday, Brennan warned that “despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach” and that the group is “training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks,” particularly in the West. He explicitly warned that “refugees flows, migrant routes, and legitimate methods of travel” are on the list to be exploited by Islamic State terrorists to smuggle their operatives into the West.
Gorka noted that the admission that the Islamic State remains strong and that the ideology of jihad is what motivates radical Muslim terrorists to kill is one the White House appears incapable of making. “The president and his coterie at the top level live in a bubble,” he argued, “they manufactured this narrative that there is no such things as jihadism, terrorism is a product of poverty and lack of education, and they locked themselves into that narrative.”
Host Hannity noted that many law enforcement manuals no longer permit the use of Islamic terms like “jihad” and “sharia” in training law enforcement for counter-terrorism intelligence operations. And with thousands of Middle Eastern refugees coming into the United States – 441 from Syria between the Orlando night club massacre and Thursday night alone – Hannity suggested that the government of President Barack Obama is “playing Russian roulette.”
Gorka agreed, “if we consistently allow the government to shut down those systems that keep us alive and safe.”
To reform our law enforcement, Gorka recommended three steps: “get politics out of the threat assessment,” “empower the Muslims that are at risk in the region” and seek to fight back against jihad, and “delegitimize their narrative, their ideology.” Of the latter, he said jihad “is too sexy right now” and only an international propaganda campaign to weaken the appeal of that ideology will diminish the threat.
Dr. Gorka’s book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, is available now.
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