Sebastian Gorka To Headline Counter-Terrorism Conference In Israel

By Nathan Guttman September 5, 2017

Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s ousted counter-terrorism adviser, is off to Israel to deliver a keynote speech at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, a private college outside Tel Aviv.

An invitation to the conference, scheduled for September 11 to 14, lists Gorka as the main speaker on the conference’s first day, just before a planned memorial ceremony for the 9/11 terror victims. Other speakers at the conference include Israel’s defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, several other cabinet minister, former French prime minister Manuel Valls and counter-terrorism experts from Israel and from across the world.

Gorka had called for identifying Muslim extremism as the main source of terrorism threat to the West.

Gorka was fired from the White House last month as part of an overhaul conducted by new chief of staff John Kelly. He has maintained a high-profile in the media, defending Trump and vowing to fight for ensuring the president lives up to the conservative and nationalistic values he ran on.

The Forward revealed in a series of investigations that Gorka has extensive ties to a far right wing group in his native Hungary that was allied to the Nazis during World War II.

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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