I dare to say that Gorka, even with a bogus Ph.D. and a quasi-Nazi medal, is not entirely wrong—and because of his Trump associations, his bombast, and his overwhelming preponderance of misguided thinking, some are reluctant to acknowledge when he has a point.

Consider his emphasis on religion. To associate jihadist terrorism with Islam, say his detractors, is to aid and comfort bigots, and to make the case for Trump’s travel ban targeting mainly Muslims, which Gorka has indeed defended. Gorka goes further than merely associating Islam with terrorism; he suggests that terrorism flows inevitably from faithful practice of it. (It is not crazy to suggest that Koranic verses urging violence are indeed urging violence; it does not follow, though, that violence is the only reading of those verses.) But his more limited claim—that religion matters for ISIS and other jihadist groups—is right, as any serious student of the subject will affirm.

Last year, the sociologists Lorne L. Dawson and Amarnath Amarasingam concluded a study of foreign fighters in Syria by saying their interviews of fighters

were so heavily mediated by religious discourse it seems implausible to suggest that religiosity (i.e., a sincere religious commitment, no matter how ill-informed or unorthodox) is not a primary motivator for their actions. Religion provides the dominant frame these foreign fighters use to interpret almost every aspect of their lives, and this reality should be given due interpretive weight.



The authors differ from Gorka in almost every way. They are methodical, critical of their sources, and sophisticated in their approach to the religious claims. But they are part of the same heresy against liberal dogma, in their suggestion that religion cannot be ignored.

Or consider the following debate between Gorka and the anthropologist Scott Atran. Atran says that jihadism has become a counterculture, and that “sacred values” had been “very important in motivating people and bringing them together from all walks of life” to wage jihad. Gorka calls Atran’s argument “utterly fallacious and absurd,” failing to notice that Atran’s position is compatible with his own. Gorka claims that religion is important, and Atran describes how the “meaning” so crucial in jihadism comes from sacred values. Disagreement arrives only when the host, Mehdi Hasan, ventures the opinion that political and socioeconomic factors might be the most important, and each guest rejects that theory, in his own way. (No serious terrorism analyst believes that poverty and jihadism necessarily go together—if they did, why are there so many poor peaceful people, and so many rich violent ones? —so Gorka gets no points for saying so.)

Why then am I confident that despite this improbable harmony, Gorka and Atran did not leave the Al Jazeera studio as chums, retiring to the nearest tavern to chuckle at their former enmity? To put it simply: The problem with Gorka isn’t what he says, but a suspicion that he operates in bad faith. “It’s not really the content,” says one scholar of jihadism who disagrees with Gorka. “It’s the tone, the bluster, the myopia. When I see him and he opens his mouth, I expect to hear the worst”—including blatant bigotry against Muslims. Just as apologists see nothing bad about Islam, Gorka cannot see anything good about it. Both refuse to imagine that it is like other religions, with potential for good and evil (even if every religion also has aspects specific to itself).