Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War and National Security Editor for Breitbart News, appeared on Fox Newswith Sean Hannity to discuss the latest child-soldier video from the Islamic State, in which a toddler is given a pistol and assigned to execute a helpless prisoner, and a boy of perhaps 10 performs a decapitation.
Gorka said he had no doubt the children carried out the grisly actions depicted in the ISIS video.
“I watch these videos in their entirety. That’s my job, to look at these things, even if they’re stomach-churning,” he noted. “In fact, very recently, my wife and I published a report exclusively on this topic at our website, ThreatKnowledge.org, explicitly about ISIS exploitation of minors. We got access to the textbooks they’re using in the jihadi schools – that teach children, Sean, how to count by using Kalashnikovs. One Kalashnikov, two Kalashnikov – this is the future threat of jihad.”
“And the importance of this is, it blows out of the water the Obama administration’s argument that terrorism is the result of poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. A 10-year-old child doesn’t have a job to be fired from. This is about pure evil,” Gorka said.
Hannity turned to the question of Russia, and President-elect Donald Trump’s position that better relations with Russia would be a “good thing, and only stupid people would think it’s bad.” He argued that joining forces with Russia against ISIS would imply no great trust for the Russian government or President Vladimir Putin, much as the United States remained suspicious of Russia after cooperating against the Axis in World War II.
“My father was tortured and imprisoned by Communists, so you’re not going to get me to say nice things about Russia or Vladimir Putin – who was a KGB officer, let’s remember that,” Gorka said. “But you’re absolutely right. We allied with bad guys to get rid of worse guys. That’s what the history of World War II is about. There is this famous saying that politics is the art of the possible. Well, so is strategy. You don’t make the ideal the enemy of the good. If you’ve got 10-year-old children beheading and shooting unarmed men to death, you’ve got to stop that threat first.”
He said it was absolutely possible to defeat ISIS without a major deployment of U.S. ground troops.
“If you talk to General Flynn, if you read the speeches by President-elect Trump, it is very clear. This is not a neocon administration that wants to invade other countries. We are going to help – with embedded troops, with intelligence, with training – local actors to fight this war,” Gorka said.
“They have to stand up and fight it themselves, because it doesn’t make sense for us to do it for them. We can help them, Sean, but it’s going to have to be the Muslims who want to be our friends that destroy ISIS,” he declared.