Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a Fox News contributor and author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the horrific terrorist attack on a mosque in Egypt, with over 300 fatalities.
Gorka explained that Egypt is “on the front line in the war against global jihadism,” and the Sinai has become “a battleground between Egyptian authorities and ISIS offshoots.”
“The jihadists will kill anybody,” he said. “Their targets are Christians, Jews, Yazidis, but in fact the top of the list for a jihadi organization is those Muslims who they deem to be apostates, those Muslims who disagree with them.”
“Sufis are very, very high on that list,” he noted. “You don’t have to be an atheist, you don’t have to be a liberal, you don’t have to be Christian to be in the sights of a group like ISIS or al-Qaeda. In fact, if you’re a Muslim who disagrees with them, they’re going to come after you first. Egypt, especially under President Sisi, has been very, very much with us – at least with this administration – in wanting to fight the jihadists. That’s why Egyptian Muslims are being attacked.”
Gorka said the assault on a Sufi mosque during Friday prayers showed signs of “prior planning” and involved 25 to 35 heavily-armed attackers, making it a much larger operation than the now-familiar bombings, stabbings, shootings, and vehicular assaults perpetrated in the West by loners or small groups of jihadis.
“It just tells you that this is really the application of irregular warfare or insurgent tactics against unarmed civilians,” he said. “When you don’t have security on site, 30 people with automatic weapons can do a massive amount of damage. Unfortunately in this case, they did.”
Gorka said the attack underlines the importance of supporting Muslim allies like Sisi in Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, and the value of Egypt in particular as an ally against Islamist extremism.
“When I met then-General Sisi three years ago during the Obama years, he asked a very, very trenchant question,” Gorka recalled. “He said, ‘We thought you were our friends. Why aren’t you helping us?’ That was under the administration of President Obama and Secretary Clinton, when this country was backing the Muslim Brotherhood – backing the bad guys in the region. That all changed on January the 20th, and we just have to double down, support all the Muslims who are on our side in this fight.”
“At the top of the list is President Sisi, King Abdullah. It just reinforces how we have to help them win this war, because it shouldn’t be us. It shouldn’t be, you know, white-faced Christians or black-faced Americans that win this war. It should be the local Muslims who want to be our friends, who with our support should be the victorious face of this war,” he contended.
Turning to another important Middle Eastern ally, Gorka advised cautious optimism with respect to “the prospect of Saudi Arabia finally cleaning house.”
“Remember what happened in Riyadh: the president went to the heart of the Muslim world, to the hijaz. He spoke to more than fifty Arab and Muslim heads of state, and it wasn’t diplomacy. There was no pablum or boilerplate. He actually said, ‘You need to clean your houses, your places of worship, of the extremists. You need to quote-unquote rid your society of the terrorists.’ That was the Riyadh speech. Less than two weeks later, the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, turned on Qatar, the gravest funder of Wahhabi extremism today,” he pointed out.
“And now Saudi Arabia, which has had problems in the past – let’s not be shy about it – has decided to clean its own house, get its own house in order. It won’t happen overnight, but MBS has triggered something that could bring Saudi Arabia back into the fold of normal nations,” said Gorka, referring to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s campaign against extremism and corruption.
Marlow asked Gorka about his recent profile at the pro-Second Amendment magazine Recoil. Gorka called it “an in-depth interview that’s making liberal heads explode across the country.”
“I just keep on posting it because clearly they still haven’t gotten over their panic over the fact that guns must be evil innately,” he said.
“The article is about how I got to the White House, my family background, my parents having lived under communism, and my belief that the Second Amendment, American ownership of guns, isn’t about hunting whitetails in the winter. It’s about the last line of defense against a tyrannical government,” he explained.
“A lot of people have problems with that, but I stand by the Second Amendment. I stand by what the NRA has done for American freedoms, and the fact that if you want to be safe, just remember what happened – the first thing that was confiscated in Germany during the Nazis, the first thing Mao, Lenin confiscated was private firearms. That tells you everything you need to know,” said Gorka.
He recalled the old joke about carrying a firearm for protection because “carrying a policeman is too heavy,” adding that beyond self-defense against criminals, the Second Amendment is about “protecting the democracy, about protecting the republic that is the United States.”
“If you don’t have that option – if only people with badges, if only the government is armed – you have no guarantee,” he elaborated. “You have no ultimate guarantee over your liberty or freedom. That’s why after the freedom of speech, it’s right up there as Number Two. There’s a reason the Founding Fathers put it right there at the top.”
Marlow pointed out the contradiction between saying that only the police should have guns, and accusing the police of being dangerous racist killers, as so many on the left are prone to do.
“This is where it’s so clear that the internal logic of the left simply breaks down,” Gorka agreed. “Either government is efficient, or it isn’t. If the police are evil because they represent The Man, then why would you want to have, for example, government run your health care? The lack of internal logic completely breaks down.”
“It’s not about logic. It’s about emotions, and it’s about the Nanny State, and it’s about one very simple phrase: ‘The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.’ They don’t want to have big citizens,” he said.
Gorka said he was looking forward to the 2018 midterm elections, which may prove to be “even more consequential than November the 8th last year.”
“This is the moment, when you look at the reality of what Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have created for this nation, I think it is the anti-Establishment candidates that will define this year,” he predicted.
“We have to remember, it’s not about the first 10 months of this administration, although it’s been stellar. It’s about eight years of the Trump Effect, and then eight years of President Pence. Everybody has to relax. Everybody has to understand it’s about the long game,” he stressed.
“Whether Steve’s in the White House or whether I’m in the White House is irrelevant,” Gorka said, referring to the positions he and Breitbart News Executive Editor Steve Bannon held as deputy adviser to the president and chief strategist, respectively. “It’s not even about the president. This isn’t about one man. It’s not a cult of personality. It’s about taking the country back, returning to the founding principles.”
“Whether it’s Brexit or whether it’s the Trump phenomena, it’s about representative government again, and it’s about accountability in Washington. That’s the message that Breitbart holds up so high, and that’s we follow what Andrew started, and what you started as Employee Number One. We have to keep those principles alive,” he declared.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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