On Tuesday, the press focused on whether Mevlut Mert Altintas, who assassinated Andrei Karlov, Russia's ambassador to Turkey on Monday in Ankara, acted alone or was, in the words of Russia's Vladimir Putin, "directed." There will almost certainly be similar speculation over the driver of the "truck that mowed down the crowd on Monday, killing at least 12 people" in Berlin, Germany, if and when he is captured.
A Tuesday morning guest on Fox & Friends sharply criticized the very idea of "lone wolf" terrorism, calling it "a concept designed to make Americans stupid."
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is "the Vice President and Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare at the Institute of World Politics in Washington."
Gorka is also the author of 2016 New York Times bestseller book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, insists that: "The war against the Global Jihad Movement, a modern totalitarian ideology rooted in the doctrines and martial history of Islam, is eminently winnable if we remove our ideological blinders and apply basic strategic principles."
In January, he testified before the House Armed Services Committee, in which he stated the following (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Your children, my grandchildren, will be hunting jihadists a hundred years from now unless we take down their ideology of Global Jihadism. And the only way we can do that is if we finally remove politics from threat assessment.
For the last seven years there has been a political infection of our threat assessment. When the enemy says they’re jihadists, you don’t get to call them unemployed disenfranchised individuals who need a better education.
Gorka, as would be expected, pulled no punches in his Tuesday morning interview, most of which can be found below:
Transcript (bolds are mine):
AINSLEY EARHARDT: Are they targeting Christians?
DR. SEBASTIAN GORKA: Oh my gosh. The magazine of ISIS, Dabiq, D-A-B-I-Q, had a recent issue. The front cover was a photograph of a jihadi, an ISIS jihadi, on the roof of a church in the Middle East, tearing down the cross on that church. And the title of that issue was "Break the Cross."
When we invaded Iraq in 2003, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today, with the declaration of the Islamic State and the rise of ISIS, there are less than 200,000 Christians left.
EARHARDT: Wow.
GORKA: Absolutely, Ainsley. They are targeting Christians. In the Middle East, in America and in Europe.
STEVE DOOCY: Okay. Do you find, as I hold up the cover of The New York Post where yesterday this off duty cop in Turkey shot the Russian ambassador in the back.
He was standing behind him live on television. Everybody thought he was part of his security detail. Turns out he did have a badge and a gun, and he took that moment to kill the ambassador and then shout "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! We die in Aleppo! You die here!" Do you see these things connected in any way?
GORKA: Absolutely. So Steve, this idea, there’s this phrase that floats around D.C. called "lone wolf terrorism." I completely reject it. "Lone wolf" is a concept designed to make Americans stupid. There is no such thing as lone wolf terrorism.
Whether you are the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, the 9/11 hijackers, this police officer in Turkey, they are all connected. And the connective tissue is the ideology of jihadism.
We have to understand, people aren’t just sitting in their basement one day, go on the Internet and suddenly become jihadis. That is bogus. They buy into the narrative of jihad. They choose that lifestyle and then they kill the infidel.
PETE HEGSETH: Dr. Gorka, you know we've heard our President-Elect talk about securing our borders, extreme vetting, crushing ISIS, rebuilding our military. We know he's taking this threat seriously.
But in Germany, 1.1 million refugees have come in in 2015 alone. Angela Merkel has admitted it was the wrong approach. What can they do now in Europe, even though they've left so many in and they don't know what their motives are?
GORKA: Well, this is the real issue. And Angela Merkel just gave her press conference when she said, "We will live in freedom and openness." No you won't, Angela Merkel, as long as you have 1 million refugees who you haven't vetted.
Right now, they have to go back, they have to screen these people with counterintelligence screening interviews. And on top of that, they have to do what the NYPD has done.
The horse is out of the stables. You have to reinvent, rediscover human intelligence. you have to have undercover assets in the mosques, in those places where the radicals recruit, and you have to identify that jihadi before they go kinetic, before they build that pressure-cooker bomb, or kill their fellow citizens with just a truck. That's what they have to do, Pete.
Gorka has previously sharply criticized the Obama administration for "trying for more than five years to explain away the jihadi threat to America and misdirect your understanding of how serious the dangers are." He presents this graphic to demonstrate that the dangers have increased (note that the chart presents subjects and terrorists, not victims):
Gorka largely blames "the systematic subversion of our national security establishment under the banner of inclusivity, cultural awareness, and political correctness has continued to increasingly endanger Americans."
It's pretty hard to disagree.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
