Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, said, “the geostrategic importance of the coup in Turkey cannot — literally cannot — be overemphasized” during a weekend appearance on Fox News. He then went on to discuss the official U.S. response to recent jihadi massacres.
“This is the largest military in Europe belonging to NATO,” Gorka pointed out. “It was a pivotal ally during the Cold War. And under the last few years, under the reign, and I do mean the reign, of Erdogan, it has become a fundamentalist nation — a nation run by a crypto-Muslim Brotherhood type of elite.”
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“And now the military has said, ‘Enough is enough, we’re taking our country back,’” Gorka explained, speaking while the outcome of the coup was still in doubt. “Remember the legacy of Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish state, was that the military was always going to be the guarantor of democracy.”
“They were intimidated under Erdogan. The former chairman of the joint chiefs was arrested on a completely false, trumped-up terrorism charge,” Gorka recalled. “He tried to intimidate the political elite. He tried to intimidate the military elite. Now the military has stepped up to the plate and said, ‘You’ve been playing footsie under the table with the Islamists. You’ve been helping ISIS. We’re going to stop it.’ This is big news.”
He predicted Turkey’s ongoing effort to become a full member of the European Union would be damaged by the coup, regardless of its ultimate outcome.
“Think about what Brexit was about,” Gorka said. “Brexit wasn’t just about sovereignty and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels deciding, you know, what a British sausage could have in it. It was about national security. It was about the idea that you cannot vet people coming from a war zone, as refugees into the continent of Europe. With some countries like Germany accepting more than a million so-called refugees, who then have freedom of movement inside the E.U.”
“And Secretary Kerry, although he denied this, somebody should tell him the facts: one of the Brussels bombers got into Europe on a fake Syrian passport, and was awarded refugee status in the E.U.,” he added, citing it as evidence that terrorist penetration of European security using the migrant tide “isn’t a hypothetical — it’s a reality.”
“ISIS is doing this, and they have plans to do it here in America as well,” Gorka warned. “The question of Muslim populations, integration, the exploitation of those communities that aren’t integrated — this is national security at the highest level.”
Asked if the Nice, France, terror attack would mark an end to accepting terrorism with little more than candlelight vigils to mourn the fallen, Gorka replied, “That’s up to us. That’s up to the French voters. That’s up to the German voters, the American voters. Because the elite has failed us.”
“If you talk to the operators, if you meet with the French intelligence agents, the law enforcement agents, you meet with the FBI special agents pounding the pavement, trying to keep us safe, they get it. They know the threat to America. That’s not the problem,” he said:
The problem is the political elite that says, you know, “these are not the droids you’re looking for, there’s no such thing as jihad, religion is irrelevant, you need jobs for these guys, and we’re going to solve the problem.” That’s the issue: lack of leadership. And leadership only takes things seriously if they feel as if they’re going to lose their job, or if they’re replaced with people who truly are leaders.
“Look what happened last night with Hillary,” he suggested. “I was in the green room here in D.C., waiting to go on, and I see Hillary Clinton on the Bill O’Reilly show. I thought I’d stepped through the looking glass into an alternate universe. Why did that happen? Because she knows, it finally clicked after Nice: November isn’t going to be about pocketbooks, it’s not going to be about ObamaCare. November, for Americans, is going to be about national security, and am I going to be safe when I step out of my home every morning. She’s desperate.”
As detailed in Defeating Jihad, Gorka recommended a three-step reform program for national security: cleansing politics from threat assessments, empowering our Muslim allies, and delegitimizing the message of Islamist totalitarianism.
“No more political correctness, no more censorship,” he advised. “Be honest: who is the enemy, what do they call themselves, what is their plan? And recognize, they’re evil. They’re not victims. They’re evil.”
On the second point, Gorka noted that one of our key Muslim allies is Turkey, making its stabilization a crucial American national security interest.
“We cannot be the face of this war. White Christians, black-skinned Christians, or atheists can’t be the face of this war. It has to be the local Sunnis, who are paying the biggest price right now,” he argued. “That includes the Egyptians, the Jordanians — those governments that have been dissed, systemically, for seven years by Obama. They have to be encouraged to come together. We have to convince them we want them to win, and we have to help them to crush ISIS.”
As a child of the Cold War, Gorka recalled growing up with the understanding that “the totalitarians are always just a generation away.”
“These guys are totalitarians. The jihadis are just as much totalitarians as the communists or the fascists, they just have this religious overlay. We can only win if we delegitimize their message,” he urged. “We have to have a giant counter-propaganda campaign, like Ronald Reagan had in the 1980s.”
With those three strategies in place, Gorka predicted that “we could defeat the jihadis in a matter of a year and a half.”
He reviewed the known facts about the Nice terrorist, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who has not been definitively linked to established terror networks like ISIS or al-Qaeda as of yet.
“He’s French-Tunisian, which is very significant, because Tunisia — of all the nations in the region — has supplied the highest number of jihadis to ISIS,” Gorka pointed out. “Which is really shocking, because the conventional wisdom is that Tunisia is so ‘liberal.’ No, it’s not, and they’ve provided the greatest number of jihadis.”
“He has an S-file in France, which means he’s had run-ins with the law — petty crime, violent crime,” Gorka continued. “I don’t think he served time. He was convicted, but I’m not sure he served time. But if he did, that’s another potential avenue, because we’ve seen lots of jihadis be recruited in prison, in Europe, and also here in America.”
“The last thing is the really disappointing thing: we’ve got scores of people in intensive care still, we’ve got Americans dead, including a child, and already there are people trying to generate the narrative that, ‘oh, he wasn’t a real Muslim, he drank pork and he was a bad guy.’ So his cousin, of course, is trying to generate the kind of narrative we expect out of the Obama White House here,” he said.
He described the current state of knowledge about Bouhlel as “interesting” but “not conclusive, with regard to connections with a jihadi conspiracy” but stressed that “it doesn’t matter whether he was controlled by ISIS or not — if he’s shouting ‘Allahu akbar,’ he’s a jihadi.”
Another significant data point is that Bouhlel was in possession of the issue of al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, from 2010, which gave advice for carrying out jihad attacks using vehicles as weapons.
“Remember, ISIS came out of al-Qaeda. ISIS is the former al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Gorka noted. “In this magazine, you can download now — the FBI may come knocking on your door tomorrow, but you can download it — there’s a photograph of an F150 pickup truck, and the article, in English, says, ‘You don’t need a gun. You don’t need to build a pressure-cooker bomb. Just take your truck and mow the infidel down, like you’re mowing grass.”
“This attack should not have surprised anybody, and the fact that we have reports that the driver, the jihadi, was sitting on the boulevard for three to six hours, waiting to do the attack, and he got away with it — that’s very bad. That’s very bad,” Gorka judged.
When asked about President Obama’s odd insistence on using “diplomacy” to forestall further terrorist attacks, Gorka sighed, “Do I really have to comment?”
“It’s unconscionable, the idea that after Fort Hood, the chief of staff of the Army says that his priority concern is that we don’t threaten multi-culturalism in the armed forces,” he recalled. “After Orlando, we have the Attorney General say, ‘we will win with our best weapon, which is love.’ Can you tell that, please, to the people who were burned alive in the ovens of Auschwitz? When you’re facing totalitarians — whether they’re fascist, whether it’s the KKK, communists, Hitler, or whether it’s the jihadis — there’s nothing to negotiate about. You can’t love them. You can’t win with diplomacy. You crush them into the ground,” Gorka declared.
“Every time we have a horrific event, I say please, God, let this be the moment when the administration says, ‘OK, we messed up, we’re gonna take it seriously now. We’re gonna crush these individuals,’” he said.
On the question of whether American Muslims have integrated much more smoothly than their European counterparts, Gorka advised looking at the facts of the case: “We have killed or arrested 107 ISIS suspects in America since the caliphate was declared, two years ago. Not seven, not 77, but 107. Less than 20 percent were people that we discovered because their community told us about them. We found them through the Internet or by accident. That is a very bad number, a very bad proportion.”