Dr. Sebastian Gorka, deputy adviser to President Donald Trump and former National Security editor for Breitbart News, discussed the London terror attack with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“We need to note that for jihadists, dates are very important: 9/11 itself was the anniversary of a great defeat against jihadi fighters centuries ago. The fact that this happened on the anniversary of the Brussels attack really should not have surprised anybody,” Gorka said.
“The attack itself shouldn’t have come out of the blue,” Gorka continued, referring to Kassam’s earlier mention of the broad-daylight decapitation of British soldier Lee Rigby, in which a vehicle was also used as a weapon. He also cited the “knife intifada” of random stabbings conducted by Palestinians against Israelis and the truck attack in Nice, France.
“These aren’t things that are coming out of the blue sky. These are methodologies that are being propagated and promoted by ISIS. This is how they think. They’re not interested in investing millions of dollars and time and energy and expertise in weapons of mass destruction. They’re going low-investment, high-yield – whether it’s stealing a truck in France and plowing into almost 90 people, whether it’s buying a knife and slashing people on the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. This is their new modus operandi. It costs nothing, and it is devastating,” he said.
Gorka said jihadis would continue to exploit the Western world’s vulnerability to these cheap and deadly truck and knife attacks until “the chattering classes think that they should ban vehicles the same way banning guns will make us safe.”
“This is the beauty of this attack: it’s not about the everyday item, the inanimate object. It’s about the person driving it or using it. That’s why good counterterrorism isn’t reactive; it is preventative,” Gorka argued. “That’s why you have to find these people, use human intelligence. Here in the United States, we’ve taken the step of our travel moratorium to stop people coming from war zones who want to use these kinds of tactics against us. Now there will be the focus on all kinds of diversionary issues, not the fact that this individual was already on the radar screen of the security services a year ago.”
Gorka said there has “never been a case of an upstanding citizen or immigrant on Monday deciding on Tuesday to become a jihadi and killing his fellow citizens.”
“There’s always a progression. There’s always a digestion of jihadi ideology. There’s always some kind of statement of sympathy for the things that the bad guys are doing. That’s how we find them. That’s how we prevent the next attack,” he declared.
Kassam argued that left-wing empathy for terrorists as oppressed people striking back against unfair foreign policy, economic deprivation, or religious discrimination nourishes the sense of grievance that fuels extremism. He also noted that Islamic leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have a habit of describing refugees and immigrants as an army ready to rise up against evil Europe, which is at odds with the Left’s insistence that refugees are harmless in any quantity, from any point of origin.
Gorka responded with a favorite quote: “On the Left, reality is optional.”
“This isn’t about objective truth. It’s always been about narrative,” he elaborated. “For the last eight years, unfortunately, out of the White House, they’ve been spinning this narrative.”
“We’ve got to be super careful because if we don’t understand why this attack happened, we truly will become inured to these events,” he warned. “People will die, and then 24 hours later, we’re going to go back to business as usual.”
“The bottom line is this doesn’t happen because of grievances. This doesn’t happen because of unemployment or under-education. It happens because evil walks the earth. The Left will deny that. Their multiculturalism, their post-modernist relativism, denies the existence of evil. That’s why they were unqualified to fight this threat,” he said.
In contrast, Gorka said the Trump administration “understands people like yesterday’s attacker, the 7/7 bombers, Fort Hood, San Bernardino are a product of incarnate evil,” adding, “And we will defeat it, Raheem.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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