Image by Getty Images

By Dan Friedman March 19, 2017

It’s been a tough media weekend for Sebastian Gorka, the deputy assistant to the president who was the subject of an article in the Forward about his membership of a Nazi-allied group in Hungary.

The Chicago Tribune republished a critical review of Gorka’s scholarship by Dan Nexon, an associate professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. In the article originally published by Foreign Policy, Nexon notes that a scholar of Islam should be able to read Arabic (Gorka can’t), that Gorka uses out-of-date statistics and uses them wrongly, and that Gorka has published little but a dissertation that is no support for his chosen position.

the dissertation is particularly thin on the central topics that Gorka trades on: Islam, terrorism, and Islamic terrorism.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

The Huffington Post foreign affairs reporter Jessica Schulberg drew out the relationship between Sebastian Gorka’s mother and the infamous Holocaust denier David Irving. She was, she asserts, one of the main Hungarian translators helping with his book “Uprising!”

Irving asserts that the Hungarian revolution against the communist government was ‘primarily an anti-Jewish uprising’ ― an assessment disputed by mainstream historians.

CNN noted that a Gorka statement to Breitbart News Daily Radio about Trump’s Muslim policy is false. Gorka told the far-right opinion outlet, “There is not one instance on the campaign trail or after the President took office in which the travel suspension was mentioned without reference to national security — it was never mentioned, ‘we’re doing this because of a certain religious group.’” But six months after Trump declared his candidacy, his campaign’s December 7, 2015, press release states clearly

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re near the end of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount