More Gorka: Knowing our enemy

The current issue of WORLD Magazine features a Q&A with Sebastian Gorka, one of the world’s leading counter-terrorism experts and author of the 2016 New York Times bestseller Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War. Here are additional excerpts from our interview that we didn’t have space for in the print edition.

How can the United States know itself and the enemy? First, we have to rediscover ourselves. We have to understand it’s not our partnership with Israel or our foreign policy that makes people want to behead us. It’s what we stand for: the principles of the founding, the values of man created in the image of his maker. Second, we have to get politics out of the threat assessment—none of this political correctness censoring what you’re allowed to say about the enemy. The attorney general of the United States, after 49 Americans are murdered in Orlando, tried to censor the 911 dispatchers’ transcripts to remove mention of Islamic State, Islam, and jihad. During World War II, if you’d tried to edit a Nazi communication to remove the word “Nazi” or “Hitler,” you would have been court-martialed or perhaps tried for treason.

Why is the idea of root grievances fueling terrorism absurd? If you push the [Obama] administration on where terrorism comes from, they say it is unemployment and lack of education. As anybody with beyond a double-digit IQ can tell you, this is utterly absurd and fallacious. If poverty and lack of education caused terrorism, then half of India would be terrorists—but they’re not. What’s missing? The ideology, the catalyst that takes the individual who is aggrieved, perhaps, and turns him into a person willing to kill his fellow man or woman. This administration cannot admit that truth because they’ve stated as an article of faith, not fact, that religion can have nothing to do with this war. They’ve painted themselves into this absurd corner where they deny the Islamic State is Islamic.

Why do you say there is no such thing as lone-wolf terrorism? Lone-wolf terrorism is a phrase that is designed to make Americans stupid. The idea that a person is an upstanding American citizen on Monday and then on Tuesday suddenly becomes a raving jihadi decapitating his fellow man is absurd. It doesn’t happen. The connection between Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood, the Chattanooga shooter, the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, or Omar Mateen in Orlando is the ideology of jihad. It’s not about a mastermind in a cave somewhere operating a joystick 8,000 miles away. It’s sharing the same belief set.

What can the average person do to defeat the global jihadist movement? Every American who loves the Republic has a role to play in this war. Buy a Quran and read it. Educate yourself about the enemy. Read their publications, like Inspire from al-Qaeda and Dabiq from ISIS. Prepare your friends and the people around you for what is going on. If you have the mental fortitude and it’s legal, think about getting a license to carry a firearm. Take responsibility for your safety and practice the rights we’ve been given. Even if you can’t do that, take the “if you see something, say something” seriously. If the neighbors of the San Bernardino shooters had done so, we probably would have prevented that massacre.