Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to U.S. President Donald Trump and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, said on Tuesday that it may be “high time” for Washington to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization.
Gorka made the remark during an event at the Hudson Institute. He said he was echoing a recent comment by his boss, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the U.S. national security advisor, when he said that “the Muslim Brotherhood is the progenitor” and “the grandfather of all modern global jihadism.”
There are pushes in both houses of Congress to declare the Brotherhood a foreign terror group. Several Arab countries have already banned it.
“We have to recognize that if Arab Muslim nations like Jordan have designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization,” Gorka said. “It may be high time for us to do so as well.”
Gorka also said at the event that Trump is taking a holistic approach to Iran.
“When the president looks at the region, he doesn’t slice it down into cylinders of excellence,” the White House aide said. “He doesn’t care if you’re the Syrian desk officer or the natural resources expert.”
“He has one overlay for the whole area of responsibility, and that one metric, that one prism, is Iran,” Gorka said.
The White House adviser also praised Israel for operations that “have rewritten the map for the next 50 to 100 years” in Syria post-Oct. 7.
“With the fall of the Assad regime, the murderous mullahs of Iran do not have safe harbor and a resupply route through Syria,” he said. Israel’s effort in the country is “one of the greatest things Israel has achieved for the modern world in the last decade or more,” he said.
Trump has made Syria and its new president the “offer of a lifetime,” according to Gorka. He added that Israel and Turkey can resolve their differences over Syria by “finding the bare minimum overlap in the Venn diagram.”
Turkey has accused Israel of fomenting instability in Syria. Jerusalem is suspicious of Ankara’s long-standing ties with Syria’s new government and its plans to maintain a permanent military presence there.
Trump is seen as close to both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and has invested heavily politically in stabilizing Syria’s nascent leadership.
On Israel’s northern border, Gorka said that Hezbollah, though “not at death’s door,” is “in the ICU.”
During the event, Gorka also rejected criticism that anti-Israel views of Republican influencers are on the rise. “I think it’s probably half a dozen very loud people on Twitter and Rumble,” he said.
He added that the 80 million people who re-elected Trump “actually have a very special place in their heart for Israel.”
