We Will Lose a ‘Winnable’ War Against Jihad If We Refuse to ‘Talk About the Enemy as They Are’. Dr. Sebastian Gorka speaks to reporter John Hayward. The “history of modern jihad” began in 1979:

It begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan … that’s where al-Qaeda begins in 1979.  Then we have the Iranian revolution, hugely important because we have one nation-state that says Islam can be re-integrated into politics. …

[Gorka] added a third highly significant event from that era, which most Americans haven’t heard of: Three hundred jihadis, in 1979, armed with automatic weapons, sieged and captured the most important site in all of Islam, the Grand Mosque at Mecca.

These 300 jihadis had the blessing … of key members of the Saudi clerical class – who said, “yep, Islam’s lost its way, we’re surrounded by apostates, the King is a puppet of the West, and we need a holy war to cleanse Islam.”

When the King found that out, he invited these clerics to the palace for a little chat, and he said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I know who you are, and I know your connection to these jihadis. Let me offer you a deal. If you guarantee for me that my nation — my country, Saudi Arabia, and my family — will never, ever be threatened again by this kind of extremist violence, this jihadism, you will become… the clerics to the House of Saud. You, your sons, and your grandsons will have jobs for life.’

Crucially, the Saudi monarchy also offered the help finance the export of jihad ideology around the world.

Islam is having a reformation … which means jihad against us.

Gorka said it was crucial for Western leaders to “jettison this fantasy that you hear all the time, after 9/11, that Islam needs a ‘Reformation.’”  The Christian Reformation was driven by the urge to “get back to basics,” such as studying the Bible and developing a fundamental understanding of the faith.  That is precisely the message of the Islamic “extremists” and jihadis of today. In their eyes, they are the Reformation.

The second half of the Koran is uber-violent. It’s about killing infidels. As a result, we don’t need more reformation to get back to basics because then we will empower the jihadis. …

He also stressed the importance of understanding that, unlike the Bible and most other religious texts, the Koran is meant to be the unchallengeable word of God, dictated to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel, rather than a series of stories and prophetic revelations that might be subject to reinterpretation by later authorities.

Political correctness is endangering our survival as a civilization:

Gorka compared that government line on Islamism to the authorities informing American troops to avoid potentially offensive terms like “Nazi” as they were preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, or the authorities in the Fifties telling law enforcement to avoid terms like “white supremacist” when dealing with the Ku Klux Klan because they were really just “misguided Democrats.”

“Today we can’t use the world ‘jihad.’  We can’t talk about religion.  It is banned.  And if you can’t talk about the enemy, you will not win,” he warned.

[J]ihadis believe they are in a war, and they believe they have a workable strategy to win it. Those are the two elements most sorely missing from the West’s political leadership, which, Gorka noted, does not like to speak in terms of defeating a jihadist enemy and is often profoundly uncomfortable with using terms like “enemy,” “victory,” or “war.”