Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, defended Trump’s much-criticized executive order that sought to ban people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. | Getty Adviser declines to say if Trump believes Islam is a religion

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, declined on Wednesday to say whether the president believes Islam is a religion and said the new White House will not listen to “so-called terrorism experts” associated with the Obama administration.

In a morning interview, NPR asked Gorka about Trump’s view on Islam because the adviser had previously declined to answer that same question on the radio station. On Wednesday, Gorka again dismissed the line of inquiry.


“This is not a theological seminary. This is the White House, and we’re not going to get into theological debates,” he said. “If the president has a certain attitude to a certain religion that’s something you can ask him, but we’re talking about national security and the totalitarian ideologies that drive the groups that threaten America.”

Gorka spent the earlier few minutes of the segment defending Trump’s continued use of the words “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe extremist groups like the Islamic State. Gorka denied reports that new national security adviser H.R. McMaster had tried to persuade the White House to stop using that phrase.

“We’re not wavering on this one,” Gorka said. The threat, he added, “is radical Islamic terrorism, and it’s never changed, and it will not change.”

Gorka also defended Trump’s much-criticized executive order that sought to ban people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. After NPR noted that some terrorism specialists say it’s more important to focus on stopping home-grown extremists, Gorka dismissed the expertise of those associated with the Obama administration.

“We’re not going to listen to so-called terrorism experts who are linked in any way to the last eight years of disastrous counterterrorism,” he said. “We’re going to take a new approach. We have a new president.”

Still, in somewhat more moderate remarks, Gorka denied, flatly, that “Islam itself” is America’s enemy.

“Well, of course it isn't. That would be asinine,” he said. “As I've written in my book, this isn’t a war with Islam. This is a war in Islam, as the king of Jordan, King Abdullah, as the president of the most populous Arab nation in the world ... has stated.” (The latter is an apparent reference to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, the most populous Arab country.)

“This is a war for the heart of Islam,” Gorka continued. “Which version is going to win?”

He presented two competing ideologies — the kind “propagated by Al Qaeda and ISIS” and the Islam of America's allies.

“It's not a war with Islam," Gorka concluded. “That would be absurd. It is a war inside Islam. And we want to see our friends win that war."