by WorldTribune Staff, February 27, 2017
After taking aim at White House strategist Steve Bannon in the opening weeks of the Trump administration, the Left is now targeting his aide, – counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka.
The media assault on Gorka, which came from the upper levels of the mainstream press including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, has included “personal attacks and innuendo,” Bill Gertz reported for the Washington Free Beacon on Feb. 27.
A recent New York Times opinion piece on Gorka was headlined “The Islamaphobic huckster in the White House”. Vanity Fair labeled him President Donald Trump’s “jihad whisperer.”
“I would be very concerned if the likes of … the New York Times, and Washington Post were not attacking me. And Trump voters would be too,” Gorka said.
For Gorka, the criticism from the Left is “never truly about our policies or the issues that matter most.”
… “It’s always personal, always ad hominem,” he said in an interview at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “That tells you all you need to know about the other side’s true weakness. They can’t win on the merits of their case, so they ‘play the man, not the ball.’ ”
For Trump, Gorka is “an antidote to the politically correct counterterrorism policies of the past eight years under Barack Obama,” Gertz’s report said.
“Look, these attacks are just too predictable,” Gorka said. “As they say in the military, ‘you’re only taking flak if you’re over the target.’ ”
A top aide to White House chief adviser Bannon, Gorka is said to have been a key advocate for the Trump executive order temporarily banning travelers from seven nations linked to terrorism.
Obama had demanded that government abandon the use of the term radical Islam. Instead, his administration went to great lengths to avoid using the word Islam, opting for politically correct terms to describe terrorism, including “workplace violence” for domestic attacks, and “violent extremism”.
Gorka is said to have helped Trump, during the 2016 campaign, criticize the politically correct counterterrorism formulations of Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Retired Marine Corps. Col. Raymond C. Damm, a professor at Marine Corps University, said recent news stories attacking Gorka “were a hatchet job based on innuendo and painting a story the way you want it to be received.”
“Dr. Gorka can be polarizing because he does not follow the party line,” Damm said. However, Gorka helped Marines to better understand what motivates the terrorist threat. “And I am sorry, but being nice to them is not the answer,” Damm said. “They are scary and hate us because they have been taught to hate us their entire lives. Iron sharpens iron. Dr. Gorka made us better while he was here.”
Damm said Gorka taught at the Marine Corps University and “he made us better because he made us think.”
Rep. Trent Franks, Arizona Republican, also backed Gorka. “I have followed the recent press and social media attacks against Dr. Sebastian Gorka and am compelled to respond with disgust at the attempt to libel this American patriot,” Franks said in a statement.
Franks criticized media attacks falsely labeling Gorka as anti-Semitic. “Having called upon his expertise on counterterrorism repeatedly in Congress and used his analysis to inform our work, I can attest that Dr. Gorka is the staunchest friend of Israel and the Jewish people,” he said.
“Sebastian Gorka’s service to the nation, his reputation, and his national security credentials are all unimpeachable and I am thrilled he is now serving in the White House as deputy assistant to President Donald J. Trump.”
Gorka said critics who call his style of aggressive counterterrorism programs and their advocates “Islamophobes” are absolutely wrong.
“Half of my students were Muslim and are on the front line and paying a heavy price, more than we are in America,” he said. “This is a war inside Islam, a war for the heart of Islam — which version will be preeminent.”
Bannon aide now identified by the Left as real threat in Team Trump added by World Tribune on
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