With the arrival of Sebastian Gorka at the White House, another Islamophobe has joined Team Trump. But first, some background on the significance of this latest personnel move.
As The Intercept noted in November, his wife, Katharine Gorka, a political commentator with well-established anti-Muslim views, would be joining the Trump administration’s “DHS landing team”—the group responsible for vetting future Department of Homeland Security appointees. Like her husband, Gorka is a contributing writer at Breitbart, the far right media outlet previously run by Stephen Bannon. In her writings, Gorka has claimed that:
“in September 2011 the White House initiated a far-reaching purge of all training materials used for the military and law enforcement, excising all reference to Islam and blacklisting many of the nation’s top experts on the Islamist threat. Current training on Islam is now primarily carried out by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which puts the emphasis on Islam as a religion of peace.”
For the record, DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) is charged with taking reports of civil rights violations by DHS elements against all citizens. If Gorka believes DHS is going easy on American Muslims, she’s badly mistaken. Indeed as I have noted previously, DHS’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) programs, like other executive branch CVE programs, are inherently discriminatory against Arab- and Muslim-Americans.
Gorka has also claimed that “Islam’s leading ideologues and spokespersons have openly and repeatedly declared ideological war on America”—ignoring the fact that tens of thousands of Islamic religious leaders from around the world have condemned terrorism as heresy and declared that those who engage in it are not legitimate Muslims.
The Trump administration, however, is bullish on the Gorka world-view of Islam. This week, Sebastian, was named Deputy Assistant to the President. So how does Sebastian Gorka view Islam and its adherents?
In a February 2015 Breitbart piece, Gorka’s Manichean worldview was made clear:
“America and her allies are in a war with people who do what they do to please their God and obtain salvation by serving him as warriors. Washington summits and more community outreach will not stop the next attack against the Homeland.”
Read the rest at the Cato Institute.
