Who is Sebastian Gorka, the Trump-appointee former US officials call an ‘Islamophobic huckster?’

US President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official and media commentator, to return to the White House and serve in a senior national security role in the new administration.

(Article by Umar A Farooq republished from MiddleEastEye.net)

Gorka’s nomination to be deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism has drawn controversy over past comments he made and his views on Islam and Muslims. The role does not require Senate approval to be confirmed and was announced on Friday.

The son of Hungarian parents who fled to the UK after the failed uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956, Gorka immigrated to the US and became a naturalised US citizen in 2012. His political and media career eventually led him to serve a brief stint in the first Trump administration.

He has previously implied that 98 percent of “terrorists” in the United States are Muslim, and in a Breitbart column in 2016 demonised Muslim immigrants coming to the United States, saying that Muslims are, in the best case, opposed to American values and in the worst case, “want to kill us”.

Former US officials Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, who served in national security and counterterrorism roles in the US  government, previously said that Gorka believes that violence in the Middle East is inextricably linked to the “martial language” of the Quran.

“Mr Gorka sees Islam as the problem, rather than the uses to which Islam has been put by violent extremists,” Simon and Benjamin said in an opinion article published in The New York Times in 2017, in which they referred to Gorka as an “Islamophobic huckster”.

Middle East Eye contacted Gorka for comment on his views regarding Islam and Muslims but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication.

In recent months, Gorka has also been vocal on the Israeli war on Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed much of the enclave’s civilian infrastructure.

In an interview on Russian broadcaster RT, he said, “There is no such thing as Palestine”.

In 2020, Trump appointed Gorka to a national security education board, a position he held for several months before resigning.

In his resignation letter published in August 2020, Gorka said that certain “forces” did not support Trump’s campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” and gave this as his reason for leaving the White House.

However, reports at the time, citing US officials, said Gorka did not resign and that he was ousted from the administration.

He currently is a political commentator who appears on Newsmax and the Salem Radio Network and is a close ally of Steve Bannon, a Trump advisor who previously described Islam as the “most radical” religion in the world.

Bannon was one of the architects of Trump’s immigration policy for several Muslim-majority countries, which became known as the “Muslim ban”.

Bannon, who was released from prison in October after four months of jail time, was convicted of not complying with subpoenas issued by the now-defunct House Select Committee that investigated the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack.

Gorka has touted himself as a counterterrorism expert. But in 2017, his PhD advisor said that while Gorka was knowledgeable about some terrorism matters, “I would not call him an expert on terrorism”.

Trump’s choice to select Gorka comes after his campaign spent time engaging with Muslim and Arab leaders in Michigan to shore up support from the community and capitalise on the outrage over the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli war on Gaza.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the leading Muslim organisations in the US, criticised the appointment of Gorka back in 2020, referring to him as an “anti-Muslim bigot”.

While Trump has vowed to end the wars in the Middle East, he has also chosen several vehemently pro-Israel politicians to serve in key cabinet positions.

Read more at: MiddleEastEye.net