So what is the cause of terrorism, according to Gabbard? Islam, of course.
Before she became a progressive darling for endorsing Sanders, Gabbard became a conservative darling for relentlessly hawking the idea — later popularized by Trump — that Obama’s foreign policy was failing because he refused to use the term “Islamic extremism,” or some variation of it.
From 2014 onward, Gabbard appeared regularly on Fox News to lambast the Obama administration for avoiding the phrase. In one interview, she told the host that “the vast majority of terrorist attacks conducted around the world for over the last decade have been conducted by groups who are fueled by this radical Islamic ideology,” a statement that may be technically true due to the violence and instability plaguing Middle Eastern countries, but is wildly misleading considering that non-Muslims make up the vast, vast majority of terrorist perpetrators in both Europe and the United States.
And it wasn’t just on Fox. Gabbard took her message to any network or outlet that would have her. On CNN, she called Kerry’s refusal to use the term “unfortunate and disturbing.” In an interview with the Hill, she stressed that radical Islam was at the heart of the problem, necessitating “a simultaneous ideological strategy” to defeat terrorists.
The Right was smitten. Breitbart ran article after article trumpeting her criticisms, and former US representative Allen West praised Gabbard for “dar[ing] to challenge Obama.”
In February 2015, Gabbard had the chance to question Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Vincent Stewart. She asked him (while clearly fishing for a particular answer) about the debate over “how this ideology, how this motivation, must be identified” and what “common elements” existed among different Islamic terrorist groups, including ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. She then went on Fox and reported that Stewart had “identified very clearly that it is this radical Islamic ideology that is fueling” these groups.
But Gabbard had heavily distorted what Stewart actually said. While he did call ISIS “a radical ideology that must be countered with a moderate ideology,” he also pointed out that the common elements that had produced such groups were “ungoverned states, weak government institution, economic instability, poverty.”
Naturally, it wasn’t long before she appeared on Bill Maher’s program, where the two bonded over their mutual distrust of “Islamic extremism” and their disagreement with Kerry’s comments. After agreeing with Maher that it was “crazy” Obama didn’t want to use the two magic words, Gabbard reiterated her point: “Give them a big house, give them a skateboard, send them on their way. You think that’s going to solve the problem? It’s not.”
Gabbard’s insistence that economic factors play no role in fostering extremism, and in fueling ISIS specifically, is belied by the facts. The group pays its recruiters thousands of dollars, and Hamas officers have explicitly outlined how the promise of money has drawn Gazans to ISIS. “Those in Syria often send pictures back home showing large banknotes to lure others out,” one officer told journalist Sarah Helm.
Gabbard’s worldview also leaves out the role that European and US governments, particularly the Reagan administration, have played in bringing hardline fundamentalists to power and prominence. Bin Laden may have been a millionaire, but he was also a CIA recruit.
Gabbard’s suspicion of Islam goes beyond rhetoric. Last year, she supported legislation that would have barred those on the no-fly list — a list that makes a mockery of due process — from buying guns. Before that, in 2014, Gabbard introduced a bill that would have halted the visa waiver program for countries whose citizens had gone to fight with extremists, claiming that the program “puts the American people in danger.” Had it passed, people from the UK, France, Germany, and many other European countries would have been forced to apply for visas before visiting the United States.
In reality, foreign-born terrorists carrying out acts of violence in the United States, particularly from visa waiver countries, is virtually nonexistent. Yet Gabbard hyped the threat. “If we do nothing to close this loophole, and allow a terrorist to carry out an attack on our homeland, the impacts will be devastating,” she warned.
Gabbard’s hardline stance carried over to the subject of refugees. She was one of forty-seven Democrats to join the House GOP in passing the SAFE Act in 2015, which would have added extra requirements to the already onerous refugee vetting process and effectively ground to a halt the admission of Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the country. In a statement, Gabbard claimed she was voting for the bill to save the refugee program.
But Gabbard is less discerning when autocrats aren’t motivated by “radical Islam.” In November 2015, she traveled to Egypt as part of a congressional delegation and met Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, part of an effort to strengthen US-Egypt relations. Sisi may be a blood-soaked tyrant who’s killed hundreds of Egyptians and imprisoned many thousands more, but as Gabbard made clear at the time, he’s tough where it counts.
“President el-Sisi has shown great courage and leadership in taking on this extreme Islamist ideology, while also fighting against ISIS militarily to keep them from gaining a foothold in Egypt,” Gabbard said, urging US political leaders to “recognize President el-Sisi and his leadership” and “stand with him in this fight against . . . Islamic extremists.” Some of the Sisi government’s fantastic accomplishments in this fight include killing a group of Mexican tourists and quite possibly torturing and murdering an Italian PhD student.
But perhaps Gabbard’s closest friend on the world stage is India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi. It’s an ideal match in many respects — not because the two happen to share a faith (Gabbard is the first Hindu American in Congress), but because they both harbor noxious attitudes toward Muslims.
Shortly after September 11, Modi claimed on TV that Islam had tried “to put its flag in the whole world” since the fourteenth century and that “the situation today is the result of that.” As he campaigned for election in 2014, he threatened to deport undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh (who are mostly Muslim), calling them “infiltrators.”
But most appalling was his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat, which left one thousand people dead, nearly eight hundred of whom were Muslims. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time and has long been accused of allowing the riots to happen, with a former senior police officer testifying in 2011 that Modi said the night before the riots that Muslims needed to be taught a lesson.
Despite all of this, Gabbard has been one of Modi’s most prominent boosters in the US. “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere,” she said of Modi in 2014.
When a congressional panel was held in April 2014 on “the plight of religious minorities in India,” with witnesses testifying about the mistreatment of Muslims, Gabbard said she didn’t “believe the time of this hearing is a coincidence” and that it aimed to “influence the outcome of India’s national elections.” Gabbard voted against House Resolution 417, which criticized India’s record on religious violence and called for specific measures to guarantee religious freedom in the country, explaining that its passage wouldn’t help US-India relations. Yet two years later, Gabbard introduced a similar resolution that covered neighboring Muslim-majority Bangladesh, saying she was “particularly concerned over issues of religious freedom, and specifically, attacks against minority Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and others” in the country.
