Senior White House official slams Obama’s info war failure against ISIS

by WorldTribune Staff, February 14, 2017

The Obama administration’s refusal to discuss religion in a “religiously inspired” war was “absurd” and “in fact asinine,” a senior aide to President Donald Trump said.

“The Obama administration in 2011 prohibited discussion of religion, expressly Islam, in all counter-terror training for federal agents and military,” Sebastian Gorka said during an event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Sebastian Gorka. /Heritage Foundation/YouTube

“That’s like saying in 1944 you can’t say the word Nazi because you’ll offend a German. You have to be able to talk about the enemy and the words that they use,” Gorka said.

Bill Gertz, senior editor at the Washington Free Beacon and author of the newly released bookiWar, called for the Trump administration to re-establish a U.S. information agency that can both “promote American ideals” and counteract “lies and deception.”

“We need to retool for the information age,” Gertz said at the Heritage Foundation. “We really are deficient in this area of promoting the American ideal and we’re facing competing narratives.”

A report published last year by IntelCenter, a counter-terrorism research firm, found that between June and July 2016 there were significant terrorist attacks every 84 hours directed or inspired by Islamic State (ISIS) outside the war zones in Iraq and Syria. Gorka said the findings underscore the overemphasis of the past two U.S. administrations on a “whack-a-mole” strategy that targets individual terrorists while ignoring the root of the problem: ideology.

“For them, it’s not just a caliphate of the ground, it’s a caliphate of the mind,” Gorka said.

“We’re not going to capture all the jihadists, we’re not going to kill all of them … they’re going to move. They may go North, they may go West, they may come across the Atlantic,” he continued. “We must understand, ISIS’s battlefront begins when you leave your house in the morning. There is no battlefront like World War I or World War II, there are no trenches.”

 

Gorka suggested the Trump administration combat ISIS’s propaganda machine by establishing an information operation that is driven directly by the White House.

“We will have won when the black flag of jihad, when the black flag of ISIS is as repugnant across the world as the white peaked hood of the Ku Klux Klan and the black, white, and red swastika of Hitler’s Third Reich,” Gorka said.