somebody that as a child growing up in liberia, i have heard of, she was speaking truth to power, she was criticizing the same government that she worked for and in 1985 when she was arrested and thrown in jail by samuel godin, i heard all about that and she became at this time a political icon. >> watch "after words" sunday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span to book tv. >> now a deputy assistant to the president sebastian gorka speaks on the effort to combat isis. he spoke of the republican national lawyers association conference. this is 45 minutes. >> come on up. [applause]yo i didn't intend to make you

dance a little. i'm very pleased that we can start our day off not with a lawyer but with someone with a fierce intellect, dedication to our country and our defense and a critical advisor to our president. sebastian gorka is currently the deputy assistant to the president and was an advisor to president trump in the transition and i believe in the election process. among other things is a specialist in irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. and counterterrorism. i know something about that. my wife practices irregular warfare, so i hope to learn of it from him. doctor gorka has been a

professor and he taught -- i always messes up but he taught for the us initiative of program terrorism and security studies funded by the defense department he was at the george marshall european studies and he was at the us so com's joint operation university at the dale air force base. he also for two years was the expert on terrorism and securit. at some upstart called breitbart , i don't know if you ever heard of it. you may get some traction someday. [laughter] as sebastian is also the author of defeating jihad: thet winnable war.

we are not selling books outside but i'm sure you can get it at amazon if you want to follow upp with some of his thoughts. we have about 30 minutes. he's agreed to take some questions at the end so he'll cut his comments a little short to allow a dialogue. with that, i give you sebastian. thank you. [applause] >> good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 's pleasure to be here. thank you, larry and mayor giuliani for being so supportive it's great to be in a room of friendly's. it's been quite a ride for the last 15 weeks. what i'd like to do this morning , you heard what i specialize in grid i look at irregular warfare, i try to help

our operators understand the enemies we face like al qaeda, like isis and now i'm in a national security position inside the white house workingl. on these issues at a strategic level. let me give you a brief overview of what we inherited at 12:00 o'clock on january the 20 th and then what we intend to do or what the president attends to do. i will leave some time for questions and answers. so, the world today. the sad reality is that wherever you look, take any compass point on the compass, any cardinal point, we inherited a world on fire. whether you look to asia, whether you look to europe, whether you look to the middle east, the last administration created a vacuum.

it wasn't an accident. in the national security strategy which is the highest unclassified expression of an administration's foreign policy plans, the obama administration actually opened that document with a letter from the president stating that our policy now is strategic patience. strategic patience means americm doesn't ask. america sits back and allows others to act. i'd like to ask you a question, if you look at the world as it is today, which of the other countries would you like to be facing the world environment if not the united states of america would you like it to be iran? would you like it to be russia? would you like it to be china?

would you like it to be north korea? we facilitated as a nation for the last eight years, the creation of numerous vacuums around the world. vacuums that were filled most often by axis who do not have our interests as a nation close to their heart and do not believe in the eternal truths that we hold to be true and upon which the republic was founded. as a result, we inherited a firestorm. one metric that indicates the challenge, the magnitude of what we inherited. the united nations, hardly a crypto conservative nations hass done the research and has publicly stated that today as you sit here there are

65 million refugees in the worl 65 million. why is that important? that is a world historic record. we have never had 65 million refugees in human history. not even in 1945 at the cessation of hostilities that world war ii which saw 60 million people killed. not even then after the holocaust, the death camps, the war in asia, not even then did we have that many refugees.happn but we do today. it's not just about refugees, think about what else is happening as we sit here comfortably in the capital of the most powerful nation on god 's earth. right now, as you are drinking your coffee, eating your bagel,

there are women and children being sold as max slaves, right now. today and slave markets being run by the islamic state.r in that's the reality. that's the challenge. but now we have a commander in chief who takes that responsibility incredibly seriously. and in a just a scan 15 weeks we have turn things around. let me focus on one for it. so that you understand the enormity of the situation and that threat is the islamic state which our president has vowed, not to degrade, not to humiliate , but to obliterate. language is important. president donald trump will nott countenance politicalor polit correctness or political distortion of reality.re

remember who this man is and was not only is he a patriot, not only does he love our armed forces and what this nation stands for, he wants a success, not just a success, and incredibly successful businessman in the world's toughest market, new york real estate. right, larry? a pretty tough market. as such, he is a pragmatist, a patriot and a pragmatist combined. as a result, he looks at the world as it is, not as he would wish it to be. that was the last eight years, distorting reality to fit a preconceived notion of what the world should be like. let's focus on the most serious terrorist threat to the united states.

that's the islamic state. the walk-through very quickly three or four yardsticks that will help internalize just how very serious the threat is to america, the why the president has made it his primary mission. to destroy this organization. number one. the islamic state is unique amongst threat groups. why? because it is the world's first ever trans- regional insurgency. the first world ever. let me unpack that. it's an important one. we now know and it's out in the open, that the islamic state. [inaudible] "territory in syria, iraq, it has affiliates according to the national counterterrorism that is now unclassified and has feel fully operational, and at least

90 nations around the world. these are people who say, fully operational sub affiliates.histc let's take a little bit of historical perspective to that. maybe we have some amateur historians in the room. go back to the last hundred 17 years and pick any insurgency in modern history, any insurgency.t whether it's now in china or after world war ii, whether it's columbia, whether it's the amount and just ask yourself one question, in each of those cases , it doesn't matter which one you pick because the answer will be the same. what was the strategic objective of the insurgent group? what do they wish to achieve? it was always the exact same thing. they were any regular warfarevet

conflict against a specific government. mao wanted to take down the nationalists and take over china which he successfully did. the farc and columbia wish to take down the elite in bogotá and replace the colombian government the so-called paula varian republic representing the true people of columbia. but in every single case whichever insurgent group you chose, it's always the same objective, replace the one government that they are fighting. contrast that with isis. it's not about one government, it's about all governments. it isn't just rhetoric, it's actually happening on the ground we are making their lives far more difficult for them inks to the great work of people like general mcmasters, secretary matus and others.

think about what they have achieved in a scant six or seven years. they captured and held territory in multiple countries of the middle east, as we already know. but not only that their affiliates have also captured and held territory in other countries. you may have heard of the organization focus iran in nigeria. it's a black african jihad a group, it's name is aly combination of african in arabic literally means looks forbidden. it means western education forbidden. it's an anti- western jihadist group. two years ago they swore allegiance to the islamic state. they've done that before and had been ignored but this time someone was listening to them. the islamic state actually accepted their oath of allegiance to the new caliph.

subsequently, they changed their name and names matter. they are no longer the. [inaudible]of w they call themselves the islamic estate province of west africa. you may have zero to do with counterterrorism but it doesn't matter. think about that for a second. a jihad a group in west africa, now calls itself the west african province of the islamic state which is based in iraq and syria. have ne we have never seen this before in human history. we have never seen a threat group that actually spans, not only multiple countries, but multiple regions. that by itself means it is not a jv team. it means it is a tier one threat

to america into our friends, our allies and our partners. secondly, this islamic statet isis is just very impressive when it comes to what we call the first line of operation in insurgency. this refers to mobilization recruitment. rr the most important thing for any insurgency is recruitment. this is what separates the terrorist group from an interest insurgency. the terrorist group is 12 guys with a rusty 1911 and a hand grenade. this is the ira, government underground, terrorist group. insurgency has lots of trivial bullets, the capacity to move in daylight and capture territory. isis has that capacity. but how did you do that? it did that by recruiting tens of thousands of fighters. not talking about sympathizers,o i'm not about people that send a

little bit of money to isis, i'm actually talking about active, frontline fighters. again, this is unclassified and in the last five or six years the isis has created more than 85000 active jihadists. more than 85000 active jihadistl . that's impressive by itself. let's break it down even further of the 85000, at least, 36000 are what the fbi calls foreigna fighters. meaning people who are not from the war zone, not from a rocket or syria. they have been recruited from the outside. that's very impressive becauseui it's relatively easy to recruit some was at home and angry that somebody has come into their backyard, yes? this is what my friend david cullen wrote a book about the

accidental gorillas. when you're an afghan tribal leader and there's a foreigner running around your country, it's easy to get angry and pick up in ak.o but to travel from tunisia to syria, that's a different level of commitment. to travel from indonesia to iraq as a fighter, that's impressive and almost half of it fighters are not from the actual war zone .i it gets worse. i don't know if you know this but i'm in hungarian ethnically, i don't know if about variance but their pessimists. [laughter] i can depress you all day. [laughter] okay? get ready. i work for a man who solves problems. i'm here to set the stage and then the boss can fix it. of the 36000 foreign fighters if you break it down, from unclassified testimony from

director called me on the hill.t of the 36000, and this is a low figure, at least 6000 are westerners. brits, germans, americans who have freedom of movement on western passports, maybe some oa them are part of that these are waiver program. this is disturbing. we will be effective, we will crush and as the president said we will obliterate isis in syria with our partners but you never catch all of them and you never kill all of them.ts some of them will go home andak they will go home with skill sets they've learned that will make them very dangerous.wh

let me link this all back to here. you may think that this is stuff happening in mesopotamia, who cares but let me bring it back home. is anybody familiar with what omar 13, the pulse club shooter said to the 911 dispatcher on the night that he killed 49 americans in orlando?o. this is the largest terrorist attack in us history since 911. in the middle of that massacre, omar went to the restroom, put down his rifle and dialed 911. not to call ambulances to the scene to save the people he had shot but on the contrary to make a statement to the dispatcher.r. that statement which you can now read, you can actually accessud

the original audio, the obama administration tried to censor it. they did actually censor it until the attorney general got into high trouble for changing the words on the transcript. let me tell you what that jihad he really said. omar, standing ankle-deep in blood, said four times to that dispatcher, i am a g heidi. i do what i do for the new caliph. who is the head of the islamic state. so when i'm talking to you about isn't theoretical things, 8000 miles away. it is linked intrinsically to the threat here in america. you will know the san bernardino killers swore allegiance on social media to. [inaudible] as well.

this is not something theoretical. not something hyperbolic connected to the safety of everybody in this room. let's talk about the context of what isis has achieved. again making it unique.ake fun it's easy to make fun of the bad guys, much of the left wing media will not even use the word caliph and they'll just pooh-pooh the concept that there is something called the islamic state that it's a state and its islamic, yeah smart but let's look at what happened on june 209th, 2015. when. [inaudible] fell to a handful of isis fire fighters fighters, two weeks later the head of isis walked

into the grand mosque of muscle and walked up the pulpit and dressed in the black clerical robes cloak and wearing a black turban, he made a statement very eloquent statement where he declared that as of that moment the islamic state the collis state had been reestablished anb he was the new caliph. why is this important? let's look at that word caliphate. caliphate is not some crazy idea dreamt up by a g heidi in a cave somewhere in south asia. caliphate was a real entity for over a thousand years. first founded by the arabian peninsula in the six hundreds headquartered out of mecca and then it's headquarters moved to

damascus at the height of it power the caliphate was run out of baghdad. what was the caliphate? it was literally the theocratic empire of his. an entity that melded religion with politics and spanned a massive expanse of territory ins north africa, the middle east and even into europe. one metric i like to remind people of at the height of the caliphate's existence, apart from spain, at the height of its size, the caliphate of islam was larger than the roman empire had ever been. larger than the roman empire had ever been. the caliphate was real and has been for more than a millennia. in fact, the beginning of the 20 th century the caliphate still existed. it wasn't run by the middle east and we didn't call the caliphate the ottoman empire was the

latest irrigation of the ottoman caliph state. there is a little old man with a long white beard who was the caliph of all muslims. what happened to the ottoman empire? the ottoman empire in 1914 put its money on the wrong horse.i they thought the austro-hungarian's germans would world when world war i and wheni they didn't they were in trouble in 1918 they had to face the fact that they were on the wrong side of that war.to what do they do? they didn't want to be cut up v into little pieces so a very charismatic handsome ottoman officer came up with the answer. he decided that the only way we can survive the policy as a nation is to convince the winners of world war i including american, that we are not on their side.oibe we want to join their club. we are now going to be a western nation. that man of course became none

other than ataturk. the head of the new republic of turkey. it wasn't just a question of changing the labels on the door, remove ottoman amber, it was much more deeper. as you all know. the stuff of ataturk was muslim, said to all of his favorite fellow muslims, we can practice our faith and that's fine but that's a private issue. that's what you do five times at home and what you do on thego mosque on friday. religion can have nothing to do with politics or the governance of this country. just as the founding fathers separated church and state, i am going to some great mosque and state. that is what ataturk did.-- kim but to make sure that everybody understood his commitment in 1924, he officially dissolved the caliphate.

the emperor was given the pink slip. that's literally. that's when history changed.be a lot of people had issues with that.am a lot of people had a fundamental interpretation of the religion thought what just happened, and old army guy with no theological credentials just fired the empire and dissolve the empire and this is forbidden this is wrong.slim wor there was instant pushback across the muslim world by extremists and fundamentalists.. one of the most important things that resulted in the region of egypt less than five years was the establishment of an organization you've all heard a lot about lately the whistle mean of the muslim brotherhood. the brotherhood was established with the express purpose, don't take my word for it, google its founding documents, read the

chapter of the muslim brotherhood, the express purpose is to reestablish the caliphate that was unjustly dissolved by ataturk. it was wrong to separate islam a from politics and the only wayou that we should live is in a theocratic caliphate. that's history, that's indisputable. what happens for the next 90 years from 1920 onwards? literally hundreds of jihadist organizations were established, following the muslim brotherhood 's creation and every single one of them, al qaeda included, egyptian, hundreds of organizations across the earth tried desperately to reestablish that theocratic reality to bring back the caliphate but what happened was mark every single one of them failed for almost a century until june 209th, 2015

where one organization didn't talk about re-creating the caliphate, they simply went ahead and did it. that's isis. that's why isis is the opposite of a jv team. it is a most successful jihadist organization since the caliphate was devolved last point of why isis is special and that has to do with its narrative, it's an awful word and i hated but the message, if you will, the bumper sticker of isis must be understood because that too is different from the other g heidi groups.unding the founding muslim brotherhood

laid the stage in the 1950s we have a key individual, the founder of the muslim brotherhood, we have the current head of al qaeda and the most important of all is a man called abdullah. .... .... significance have read their works. i we captured these documents in every that's at the, so there is a plan. the most dangerous thing to do is to say the enemy is crazy and they have no plan. wrong. the enemy has a strategy. and that is wh >> the enemy have the strategy and that is why they have been

so effective. for 90 years, it was the same. we are purifying islam, the west has declared on us, whether it is through colonialism, free markets, blue jeans, what have you. we are just responding and must purify the world and reestablish the caliphate. that was the core message. isis took that and added one crucial addendum. if you read the prophetic stripture of islam like any religion, islam has the story of end times. every religion has stories, prophetic tales about how the

world will end. islam, in close parallel to christianity, has to do with a final judgment day, a series of battles between the believers and the unbelievers. and the specificity of the prophecy is geographic. the islamic state, remember the debate should we call it isil or isis? that was non existent because both names were wrong. when you have a new enemy and wish to understand them what do you call them? does your intelligence unit open the drawer of unused threat labels and pick one? of course not. when we fought the third reich

we called them the third reich not because we believed in the future empire but because they called themselves the third reich. we called the second red army the second red army not because it was the second thing our intel community counted but they called themselves that. communists call themselves communist so we call them communists. what did this group call themselves? isis originally called itself the islamic state of iran and al sh sham. what al sham? if you look it up you will find it refers to syria. that is where we got those acronyms. but that is a small part of what it means. sham in islamic prophecy is the

equivalent of the christian gid. sham is the site set to be the location of the last jihad against the infidel. if you know your book of revelation, christians are taught what? before judgment day and the second coming there will be a series of mighty battles and the most important ones happen in the plains of mcgido. a town in northern israel and where we get the word armageddon from. sham is the territory where the lost holy war will occur before all are resurrected and judged by allah. let's stop there for a second. when isis gets on twitter and

facebook and other social media platks -- plat forms and mosted more than 50,000 social media posts a day and says we are the sham. what is the message sending to the immigrant in san bernardino? look at who we are. we haven't just named ourselves after the territory in which the last war with the infidel will have occurred we actually captured it. which means what? what is the implicit message? this isn't just any old jihad. any old jihad. this isn't fighting the serbs in bosnia, fighting the indianness cashmere or she soviets in afghanistan. is is the last one.

this is last one. i grew up under the cold war. i am a child of the cold war and miss it. we were taught when the balloon goes up. october '62 we thought the balloon was going up. the message from isis is the balloon is up. we are in sham. this the last one and it is my conviction this is the only way to explain more than 85,000 jihadis recruited in just a few years because they are using end times. they are using themes that for the last eight years it was prohibited to discuss inside federal governments. i can tell you because we were at the acadmies and where was a hostage to the politically correct. that ended on 12:01 january 20th

because i think you can tell the commander and chief is not a fan of political correctness. before i stop for questions what is the road ahead? three things. three things. i outline them in my book. you can compare them to what is going on today. first thing is, excise political correctness from the threat assess: that's already happening. week three of the administration, i had a tier one operator who is on detail to nsc say you have no idea just how much we already feel unshackled because we are now allowed to do our job. we're not under the mesh, under the restraint of politically ideologically constrained limitations. the president wants us to do our job and we understand that. so morale is skyrocketing not only inside the armed forces but also inside dhs. secretary kelly is doing a fine job. so, number one, truth. you can't diagnosis an illness

unless your allowed to talk about the illness and when a jihadi says he is a jihadi, you can't just say he is unemployed. so we're talking truth to problem. second you have seen the president doing this, we have to help our friends win this war. the president is not an interventionist. anybody who thinks 59 cruise missile us this same as 160,000 troops in the middle east, has no idea what they are talking about. the president has said, i am not interested in invading other people's countries and occupying them this it in not a neocon stealth administration. the president understands you help a man to learn how to fish, you don't give him a fish. and we are here to help our friends, our partners in middle east, fight their wars for themselves. we do not wish to be on the front line because they have to win this war.

but we will help them. to win this war. we will help and provide training and intelligence but look at the body language from the solitary with king abdullah of jordan. they understand america is back and no more leading from behind which itself is an oxymoran. america will lead and help others fight their own wars. lastly, and this goes back to the cold war, what is the long term victory? churchill was right. you never go to war and never deploy one sold area unless you know what it is you wish to achieve and define the peace that will follow. ultimate victory is not killing all the terrorists. yes, body bags are not a good metric of success. that was a bad metric during vietnam and not a good metric. we can kill you wherever you are. if we have the coordinates and

everybody else is copesetic we can find you. we did it with bin laden. but that is not the ultimate measure of success. we will kill one jihadi but what happens when the next 20 people volunteer to replace him? the most description i gave is exquiset whack a mole. how do we win? not by killing all the bad guys but by making people not want to become jihadists. that is how we win. how do we do that? take a leaf out of the giffords playbook. we won the cold war without firing one shot. we had thousands of nuclear war heads and massive forces and not

one ak or m-16 was fired that cold november night. we spoke truthfully about the enemy. the president said tear down this wall and we undermined the ideology of the enemy elite. we made communism look like a hollowed out, dead, total failure. and the people on the other side took the wall down. it wasn't gi's. it was germans with their pix ax that took it down. that is how we won. that is what we have to do today. we have to destroy the credibility of the jihadi ideology by supporting our sunni allies. by far the greatest number of

victims in the war are our sunni partners. killed by the tens of thousands. america needs to understand there is a connective tissue between the fascists of world war ii, the communists of the cold war and the enemy we face today. all three are totalitarians. you could not negotiate with hitler. and you can't negotiate with these people because they all have one thing in common either you agree with them or they will enslave or kill you. same with hitler. same with baghdadi. we will have won when the black flag of jihad is as repugnant around the world as the red, white and black swastica --

swastika a repulsive. that is how we will win. and with the current president in office we will win. >> oka time for one question here. the gentlemen in the audience. [inaudible question] >> hundreds years there was an insurgency called communism which affected more than a third of the population of the world. can you compare and contrast communism to the isis jihadis today? >> absolutely.

this was the argument do we have one insurgency? and the answer is no. stalin was kicked out because his colleagues said we have to get one country left and have the insurgency succeed in russia and then we can talk about exporting it around the world. there was a decision we can have c communism spread but they have to do it for themselves. so we will support them but not sit in a cave with a joy stick and control the whole world. there was a deevolution of control and of course the massive difference is what? the massive difference is that the communist insurgency was secular. this one says we are doing it for god.

isis, al-qaeda, says we are creating something for the glory of god. whatever that is not even a real difference. why? a former communist and amazing anti commist, the hungarian official called communism a godless religion. marxism is absurd. you look at the dialectic and that it is always progressing. it is just garbage. you had a take on faith, things that could never be proved scientific. it is not really about loyalism. lots of similarities but strategic control is one difference. great question and thank you very much. [applause]

[applause] >> i want to thank dr. gorka and as a small token our our >> a small token of appreciation, this has the logo with a red baseball hat on one side. some of you may know what the hat says and a county be county map of the 2016 electoral results on the back. >> if you don't mind, i think i will give that to the boss. thank you! [applause] >> two lawyerscu