In their own words: President’s advisers wary of Islam
In exchanges on talk radio, they’ve taken a hard line
Months before they became two of President Trump’s top advisers, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka engaged in a winding conversation about Islam on Bannon’s talk radio show.
“The dirty little secret, Steve, that nobody wants to tell you, (is) what the bad guys do — what alQaeda does or what ISIS is doing right now — is not fundamentally un-Islamic,” said Gorka, who at the time of the show in April 2016 was a Breitbart writer. Today, he is a deputy assistant to the president.
The recordings of Bannon’s Breitbart News Daily radio show shed light on how a cadre of top Trump administration officials view immigration and, more spe- cifically, Muslims.
Reporting by USA TODAY and other news media about the recordings of Bannon’s statements in 2015 and 2016 prompted White House spokesman Sean Spicer to address Trump’s views on Islam last week, suggesting “there’s a difference” between Bannon’s and Trump’s views on the religion. In the recordings from Bannon’s shows, other people who have ascended to top jobs in the West Wing and the Cabinet openly aired controversial views about Muslims, immigrants in general and their threat to America.
“We must acknowledge that we are at war,” Michael Flynn, now Trump’s national security adviser, told Bannon during a discussion of Islamic terrorism in July 2016.
During an appearance on Bannon’s show in December 2015, after then-candidate Trump proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Jeff Sessions, who was confirmed as attorney general Wednesday, said the United States’ “classical” principles about religious freedoms
don’t apply to immigrants seeking to come into the country.
Though Americans are “deeply committed to freedom of religion,” Sessions told Bannon, “we are in an age that’s very dangerous. And we are seeing more and more persons enter, and a lot of them have done terrorist acts.”
“It’s time for us to think this through,” said Sessions, then a U.S. senator. He will lead the Justice Department as it defends the White House’s immigration, refugee and travel ban in federal court. “And the classical internal American religious principles I don’t think apply — providing constitutional protections to persons (who are) not citizens who want to come here.”
According to a recent Cato Institute report, out of more than 3 million refugees admitted to the USA from 1975 to 2015, three committed terrorist acts that killed Americans. They were Cuban refugees in the 1970s.
Recordings show many of the newly installed Trump figures who made regular appearances on Bannon’s show share the host’s ominous views on Islam and a hard-line stance on legal and illegal immigration.
Then-presidential candidate Ben Carson, who is Trump’s nominee for housing secretary, said last February that he thought Mohammed was “somebody who lives a life who is in no way comparable to Jesus Christ.”
Former Breitbart reporter Julia Hahn, who has been hired to work in the White House, told Bannon in August that Trump opponent Hillary Clinton could not claim to care about women’s issues “if she wants to bring large flows of unassimilated Muslim migrants who, you know, don’t have the same values toward women that Western culture does.”
Corey Saylor, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the statements indicate White House officials “have bought into false notions that Islam itself somehow endorses the actions of devil-inspired groups like ISIS.”
“It’s sort of like holding all Christian groups accountable for Jim Jones or for the actions of Joseph Kony’s militia,” Saylor said. “And that would normally reasonably be considered fringe thinking. But now we have those fringe thinkers directly in the White House.”
Those views are particularly apparent among Trump’s top national security advisers. Flynn told Bannon that it was time for the United States to declare war.
“Our enemies have declared war on us, and we have to take this on with all the resources that the United States of America can bring to bear,” Flynn said. “There is no doubt.”
“You think Congress should declare war on, on — you want to declare war on them?” Bannon probed.
“That’s right,” Flynn replied. “I think we need a declaration of war.”
In April, Gorka and Bannon described the basis of their beliefs about Islam and other world religious. Gorka laughed when Bannon mockingly noted that former president George W. Bush said Islam “means peace.”
“Let me tell you how it means peace,” Gorka said. “The word Islam actually means submission. It means surrender. Surrender to what? The will of Allah.”