Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the U.S. president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, wants to see the Western world wake up to the threats it faces from Islamist terror.
“This is when the slumbering giant of Judeo-Christian Western civilization has the existential threat waken it from that somnambulant phase it found itself in,” Gorka said in a keynote that he delivered remotely from Washington to the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem.
“In perhaps a perverse way, we need to be thankful of those barbarians’ actions, because this is the wake-up call,” Gorka told attendees.
Gorka told JNS before his speech that the Trump administration disavows the view of the prior White House, under former U.S. President Joe Biden, that white supremacy presents the gravest terror threat to America.
“Just absolute insanity. White supremacy isn’t shooting National Guardsmen a block from where I’m sitting,” he said of the Nov. 26, 2025, ambush.
“White supremacy isn’t attempting to hijack that flydubai jet,” Gorka told JNS, of the attack last month on a Tel Aviv-bound flight from Dubai. “White supremacy isn’t executing prisoners in Africa, because they happen to be Christians under the control of ISIS.”
To secure the United States, or any nation, one must “look at the threat picture as it is,” he said.
Gorka told JNS of alleged Iranian involvement in the flydubai case, that “whether or not there’s a direct command and control is really missing the point.”
“The connections don’t need to be operational,” he said. “They are simply ideologic.”
“We see one after another of these left-wing, anti-American governments fall through the writ of the populace in those countries through elections to conservative governments, who believe in national sovereignty but also believe that working with America is good for those countries,” Gorka told JNS.
“This hemisphere has been a playground for the evil, nefarious activities of Iran but for no longer,” he said.
Gorka told JNS that U.S. allies have been providing backing for Washington’s “Operation Economic Outcast” sanctions on Iran “much, much more so than the military support,” for which U.S. President Donald Trump sought but didn’t receive.
“Just this morning in the president’s daily briefing, I was reading the latest reporting concerning the constraints on fuel consumption inside Iran and the tensions that is creating domestically,” Gorka told JNS before his speech.
“When it comes to international cooperation with ‘Economic Outcast,’ that will bring the regime to its knees,” he said. “The picture is very, very good.”
‘Much bigger than hatred of one nation in the Middle East’
Gorka told conference attendees that the word “antisemitism” should be understood to mean more than hating Jews.
“The hatred of the Jewish people is really inextricably linked to the hatred of Christianity and the West,” he said. “The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ means something, and it is the Jewish faith that gave us monotheism, that established the concept of the individual having a relationship with his creator, the covenant of the original Mosaic law, that would turn into the new covenant under Jesus Christ.”
“As such, antisemitism or Jew-hatred is much bigger than simply the hatred of one nation in the Middle East,” he said in the keynote.
That hatred extends to Trump due to the president’s support for Jews, Gorka told attendees.
“It pains me to say this, because I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, and I look at Ronald Reagan as a great statesman, but not even Ronald Reagan prayed at the Wailing Wall,” Gorka said of the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
“Only President Trump, as president, went to Jerusalem and prayed at the Temple Wall,” he told attendees. “It tells you everything you need to know about why he is so hated and why not just the jihadists and the Iranian regime, but the left writ large, wishes to destroy him and everything he stands for.
Gorka told JNS that there is a “connective tissue” linking hijacked planes in New York, massacres of Nigerian Christians and burning a Jordanian pilot alive.
“It’s Salafi jihadism, and this is the real point,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s Shia or Sunni. They’re all cut from the same cloth. They all derive their ideological DNA from the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Whether there is a direct link seems to matter to Trump, who pledged a harsh reaction if it is confirmed that Iran had a hand in the flydubai operation. “I’m not going to go further with regards to that case,” Gorka told JNS.
He expressed optimism about lessened Iranian influence in Latin America, as governments shift across the region. Earlier this week, the United States, Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago published a joint statement on countering Iranian terror in the Western Hemisphere.
