A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI’s Clint Watts Cited in Wall Street Journal on Sebastian Gorka
FPRI’s Clint Watts Cited in Wall Street Journal on Sebastian Gorka
“I don’t see him in the mainstream of counterterrorism scholars, and he would also make himself out not to be in the mainstream,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former Army officer and FBI special agent. To Mr. Watts and some other experts, Mr. Gorka has bundled disparate groups working at cross-purposes—including Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah—under his single umbrella of global jihad.
In Mr. Gorka’s worldview, they say, violence is a feature of Islam, not a bug. And his insistence that U.S. policy address terrorism primarily as a religious problem, rather than as the result of overlapping factors such as poverty, social immobility, or lack of education, will reinforce the notion that the U.S. is at war with Islam, an idea that two previous presidential administrations strove to combat, his critics say.