War On Terror Neutered

Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka, a member of the faculty of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, said on Tuesday that the Obama Administration is rapidly revising federal counter-terrorism training materials in order to eliminate references to Jihad and Islam.

Government bureaucracies usually take a long time in changing a policy. In this case, he said, “I have never, ever seen such a wide ranging review executed with such alacrity.”

Although he blamed Quintan Wiktorowicz, a member of Obama’s National Security Council, for implementing the Obama Administration’s new overall policy of accommodating radical Islam, including the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, Gorka said Spencer Ackerman of Wired Magazine had helped sparked the review of federal counter-terrorism training materials through a series of controversial articles. One of those articles ran under an inflammatory headline about “Islamophobia” supposedly characterizing the federal government’s response to global Islamic terrorism.

As a result of this kind of coverage and the new policy, Gorka said the Obama Administration today forbids the use of the word “Jihad” to describe the terrorists that target America for destruction, even though they are members of the Muslim religion and openly declare their Islamic aims. What is happening in terms of redefining the threat is “unprecedented” and dangerous, he said.

The battle against radical Islam has been transformed into a concern, under President Obama and his adviser Quintan Wiktorowicz, about “violent extremism,” not Islamic terrorists or Islamists, he said.

Gorka said that the administration believes there are “good” Islamists and “bad” Islamists and the former can be dealt with. He said this policy is apparent in the decision by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to have contact with the Muslim Brotherhood “Supreme Guide” Mohammed Badei.

While some Islamists are violent and others use democratic methods to achieve power, Gorka said the fact is that they share the same goal—a world-wide system based on Sharia, or Islamic law, resulting in the destruction of America’s constitutional system of government.

Gorka said the process of changing the U.S. approach to radical Islam has even become “un-American” in the sense that training materials, including his own, are being censored by federal authorities without the trainers being told who is ordering them altered or deleted and why. “I was one of the victims of that review,” he said, explaining that certain slides from one of his FBI presentations were ordered removed. There is no “recourse to appeal” in the unfair process, he said.

Ominously, he said that U.S.-based groups sympathetic or linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are reported to have had an influence on the federal committee set up to review the materials, a fact confirmed by Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst with the Clarion Fund. Mauro reported that Islamists are even exercising influence over what the FBI is telling its agents.

Mauro told Accuracy in Media that another factor behind the ongoing review, in addition to the inflammatory reporting of Wired blogger Ackerman, is the influence of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), which issued a “Fear, Inc.” report attacking critics of radical Islam as bigots involved in “Islamophobia.”

To understand the dramatic nature of the change that is taking place, Gorka noted that the 600-page bipartisan 9/11 commission report, released in 2004, mentioned Islam 322 times and Jihad as a form of “Holy War” against the West 126 times. But the Obama Administration’s 2009 National Intelligence Strategy, a presidential-level document, doesn’t mention Islam or Jihad once, he said.

“The enemy has achieved what Sun Tzu, the Asian master of strategy, defined as the ultimate form of victory—if you can win without fighting, you can do no better,” Gorka said. “If your enemy has successfully determined the limits of what you can say about him, he is already winning.”

He went on, “The fact that it is now forbidden to use the word Jihad in government counter-terrorism training means that the enemy is controlling what we are allowed to say about him. That makes it very difficult to defeat him.”

Demonstrating the sensitivity of his remarks, delivered during a conference sponsored by the Westminster Institute, Gorka said that his speech should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of the U.S. Government. He has worked for or with various government agencies for eight years.

The title of the Tuesday event was “Dangerous Embrace: The U.S. and the Islamist.”

Gorka’s disclosures about the unprecedented nature of the radical rewriting of government counter-terror manuals and presentations came as a new book by Edward Klein discloses that Obama’s former Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said he was not sure if Obama had ever repudiated his Islamic upbringing and background.  “That’s hard to tell,” Wright said, when asked if Obama had given up Islam, a religion in which he was raised and trained. Obama today claims to be a Christian.

Gorka and Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, another speaker, discussed the advance of radical Islam under the Obama Administration, but did not hold the President personally responsible for what is happening. Instead, Sookhdeo criticized Rep. Peter King, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, for not doing enough, in his view, to expose the radical nature of Islam. In fact, King has held several hearings on the topic and has been a strong critic of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Robert R. Reilly, Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and former director of the Voice of America, was the final speaker at the conference and discussed “the Fallacy of the Islamist Road to Democracy and Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Obama’s foreign policy has been demonstrated in the overthrow of Egypt’s pro-Western ruler, Hosni Mubarak, during the so-called “Arab spring,” making way for representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to take power. The Obama Administration meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood that have followed this disaster represent a policy previously advocated by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

Gorka, who recently became an American citizen, highlighted a photo of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meeting with Muslim Brotherhood “Supreme Guide” Mohammed Badei. But he did not comment during the question-and-answer period when an audience member asked the speakers whether President Obama’s Islamic background, as discussed and acknowledged by Jeremiah Wright, was playing a role in the transformation of U.S. foreign policy in a direction that favors the Muslim Brotherhood.

Reilly, who has also taught at the National Defense University and is the author of the new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist, replied that the flawed U.S. Government approach to radical Islam was bipartisan in nature.

            Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.