Sebastian Gorka, the top counterterrorism adviser to Donald Trump, is one of the most loathsome characters in a White House full to the brim with them. As part of Trump’s war on the press, he warned that any criticism of Trump amounts to “fake news.” He has gone as far as to call and threaten a private citizen who questioned whether he had the credentials to serve at such a high level. He has faced criticism for his argument that Islam is inherently violent–a view rejected by terrorism analysts on both sides of the aisle.
Most alarming of all, however, Gorka has documented ties to racist and anti-Semitic interests in his native Hungary. When he lived there from 1998 to 2008, he edited a notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper, and served as a translator and press adviser to a group that wanted all Jews expelled from Hungary.
He also faces accusations that he concealed his membership in the Historical Vitezi Rend, an organization that is on an official State Department list of Nazi collaborationist groups. As a result, membership in this organization is almost always grounds for keeping a member from entering the country. While a leader of the Vitezi Rend says that Gorka is a member, Gorka himself has adamantly denied this.
But even if Gorka is telling the truth about not being a member of this organization, he’s going to be hard pressed to explain statements that were recently unearthed by The Forward, the same publication that turned the hot lights on Gorka’s far-right ties in February. Back in 2007, Gorka was caught on tape expressing support for a Hungarian version of the Ku Klux Klan that was banned as a threat to Hungary’s minority groups.
The Forward discovered that in August 2007, Gorka gave an interview to Echo TV, a Hungarian channel with close links to the far right. Watch here.
Gorka had recently launched a political party, the New Democratic Coalition. He announced that he and his party had thrown their support to the Hungarian Guard, a black-vested paramilitary organization with the stated goal of defending “ethnic Hungarians” who lacked adequate means of “physical, mental, or spiritual self-defense.” It was founded as an adjunct to the far-right Jobbik party.
The Guard’s formation gave Jewish groups both inside and outside Hungary goosebumps. The outfit’s uniforms and character brought back memories of the Arrow Cross, the fascist group that ruled Hungary during the last eight months of World War II–a time that saw thousands of Jews shipped to Auschwitz.
Indeed, the Guard was virulently anti-Semitic, and many of its members attended memorial services for Arrow Cross leaders. The late Congressman Tom Lantos, who fought against the Arrow Cross during his teenage years in Hungary, went as far as to propose legislation to keep Guard members out of the country.
But Gorka brushed off those concerns. He said that he and his party supported the Guard, saying that it fulfilled “a big societal need.” He claimed that the Hungarian military was not up to the job of defending the country because it was “sick” and was a reflection of “the state of Hungarian society.” He argued that a series of disturbances in the country proved that “a need has arisen” for a group such as the Guard. In response to concerns that the Guard was stirring up anti-Semitic sentiment in Hungary, Gorka dismissed them as “the very useful tool of a certain political class.”
That winter, the Guard organized a series of highly intimidating marches against the Roma, the people most of us know as “Gypsies”–historically, some of the most oppressed people in the world. Those marches ultimately led to the group being banned in 2009. The European Court of Human Rights upheld this move in 2013, finding that it was “the least violent manner” to deal with an organization that posed a clear threat to minority groups. Also in 2013, two Guard members were convicted of a wave of racially-motivated murders of Roma.
In a sane world, this should have ended any realistic chance of Gorka getting the security clearance he needed to work at the White House. But then again, we’re talking about a White House where a guy can scuttle domestic violence charges against him by bullying his wife into not showing up for court, have documented ties to racist organizations, and be registered to vote at a house where he doesn’t live–and still get a security clearance. We’re also talking about a White House where a press secretary can plant a fake news story and still keep his job.
In other words–this revelation is yet more proof that this administration is not normal. It’s also more proof that Gorka needs to be out of a job.
(featured image courtesy 7th Army Training Command, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
