Third Bretbart alum joins Trump administration

[Jacque67 7,328]

Breitbart’s national security editor will become the latest employee of the right-wing website to join the Trump administration, Business Insiderreports.

Sebastian Gorka will likely serve on Trump’s National Security Council, according to the report.

Gorka, who has worked for Breitbart since 2014, is known for his hardline stances on Islam and the War on Terror. He had also worked as a Fox News contributor, though the network terminated Gorka’s contract when executives learned of his new position in the administration.

[Jacque67 7,328]

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/315841-third-breitbart-alum-joins-trump-administration

the hill...trump's favourite read;)

[eieio 1,594]

13 hours ago, Jacque67 said:

Breitbart’s national security editor will become the latest employee of the right-wing website to join the Trump administration, Business Insiderreports.

Sebastian Gorka will likely serve on Trump’s National Security Council, according to the report.

Gorka, who has worked for Breitbart since 2014, is known for his hardline stances on Islam and the War on Terror. He had also worked as a Fox News contributor, though the network terminated Gorka’s contract when executives learned of his new position in the administration.

Great choice. This is a great man. I have seen him on Fox quite a few times and he understands the problems we are facing. 

[Jacque67 7,328]

That said, Gorka’s main claim to the president’s ear are his views on Islam. He has a lot of them, but apparently not a great deal of expertise to back them up.

Islamic terrorism can be attributed to the “martial” parts of the Koran, Gorka recently told The Washington Post in a profile about his career, and he rejects the “famous approach that says it is all so nuanced and complicated.”

Yet as The Post points out, “Gorka’s academic credentials, particularly on the subject of ­Islam, are thin.” His three years as a British reserve intelligence soldier were spent studying Northern Ireland, and when he taught at the College of International Security Affairs (which had not yet been accredited), he immediately developed a reputation among his peers as “a dynamic lecturer and an uneven scholar.” Despite not speaking Arabic and never living in a predominantly Islamic country, he would often clash with both his fellow professors and his Muslim students who protested his claim that the Koran itself was the main source of Islamic terrorism.

[Jacque67 7,328]

http://www.salon.com/2017/02/21/trump-adviser-sebastian-gorka-has-positioned-himself-as-an-expert-on-islam-despite-lacking-expertise/

 

yeah, Sebastian Gorka, PhD no less!!! The merkin wearing alpha! A bit like John Miller!!! Makes things simple for folks to reconfirmed their prejudices!

trump only surrounds himself with the best!!!

i read Ellison is cool too, per Trump's tweet an hour ago....even though he's Muslim . Rock on!!!!

[CaliCat 3,957]

14 hours ago, Jacque67 said:

Breitbart’s national security editor will become the latest employee of the right-wing website to join the Trump administration, Business Insiderreports.

Sebastian Gorka will likely serve on Trump’s National Security Council, according to the report.

Gorka, who has worked for Breitbart since 2014, is known for his hardline stances on Islam and the War on Terror. He had also worked as a Fox News contributor, though the network terminated Gorka’s contract when executives learned of his new position in the administration.

 

Another passenger boards Trump's ship of fools....

[Jacque67 7,328]

Loose cannon !!!!

 

The White House advisor was clearly wounded by Smith’s taunts. “Why is this vitriol popping out of you, every day now?” Gorka asked Smith in his call. ”I look at your Twitter feed once or twice a day and it’s half a dozen tweets about me, and I’ve never even met you.”

“Wow,” Smith responded. “Are you defeating jihad by monitoring or trolling my Twitter feed?”

Gorka expressed puzzlement several times that he was being attacked “by someone who’s never met me.”  

“I’ve never met you and I’ve never attacked you,” he said to Smith, his voice rising in frustration and anger. “And your Twitter feed is an incessant berating of my professional acumen. Put yourself in my shoes, Mr. Smith. Have you done that? How would you like it if someone you’ve never met, daily and professionally attacked you?”

“Happens all the time,” Smith responded. Generally speaking, academics and journalists laboring in the field of public policy expect to be criticized for their views.

"It's not happened to me,” Gorka said, “I can tell you. Maybe you can show me some trick on how you deal with it. This is the first time ever.”

In fact, questions about Gorka’s views and credentials to speak authoritatively on Islam and terrorism were severely criticized in lengthy feature articles in The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in recent days. He also received a wave of unfavorable publicity in January 2016 when he was arrested for trying to pass through a TSA checkpoint at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. carrying a loaded handgun. He was charged with a misdemeanor and sentenced to six months probation.

One of his most influential critics is Cindy Storer, a leading former CIA expert on the relationship between religious extremism and terrorism.

“He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts,” Storer was quoted as saying in the Journal .

Smith asked Gorka why he didn’t telephone Storer, "who called you nuts in the Washington Post,” to complain. Gorka responded that Storer’s remark wasn’t “in a Twitter feed that is being sent to people on Capitol Hill.”

Gorka’s scholarship has also come under scrutiny by Mia Bloom, an expert on “transcultural violence” at Georgia State University. “He doesn’t understand a fraction of what he pretends to know about Islam,” Bloom was quoted as saying by the Journal. Bloom has participated in TV appearances with Gorka and at a panel last year at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Nor has Gorka—who does not speak Arabic and has never lived in a Muslim-majority nation, according to news accounts—submitted any of his articles for review in scholarly journals, says Lawrence P. Rubin, associate editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, the leading journal in that field.

“Gorka has not submitted anything to the journal in the last five or so years, according to my records and we have never used him as a reviewer,” Rubin tells Newsweek. “We would not have used him as a reviewer because he is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community.”

A government expert on Middle East radical movements, who asked not to be named for fear of being fired, tells Newsweek she was disturbed to hear Gorka suggest at a talk he gave in Israel a few years ago that he knew of a “specific person in the [Obama White House] who was deliberately misleading the government” on terrorism issues. “He said he wouldn’t name the person on stage but would provide the particulars” privately to anyone there who wanted to know, she said. Noting the audience was full of potential adversaries, she called Gorka’s remark “‘beyond the pale.”

Several times during his call with Smith, Gorka invited him to the White House to hash out their differences “face to face, man to man,” as he put it in one exchange. They set a tentative date for March 8.

But Smith warned Gorka that “in absolute fairness to you, what you will hear is that I have very serious concerns about our national security,” and in particular Gorka’s role “as an adviser to the president of the United States.”

“If you make a devastating case, then so be it,” Gorka said.

“So be it?” Smith answered. “Then what, you’ll acknowledge you're out of your league?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Gorka said. “Bring it on."

Late Wednesday, Gorka withdrew his invitation.

[Jacque67 7,328]

http://www.newsweek.com/sebastian-gorka-white-house-terrorism-adviser-angry-call-559805