Sebastian Gorka’s Tough Media Weekend
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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by Foreign Policy, Nexon notes that a scholar of Islam should be able to read Arabic (Gorka can’t), that Gorka uses out-of-date statistics and uses them wrongly, and that Gorka has published little but a dissertation that is no support for his chosen position.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.
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.
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