Chris Wray Is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.
On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.
The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.
Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on “Threats to the Homeland” on Capitol Hill, September 24, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/Pool/Reuters)
His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.
On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.
The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.
Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”
Does that sound familiar? It should. On a global stage, it mirrors in many ways the Muslim Brotherhood. Not a precise reflection, but it is similar (and bear in mind that these movements are in very different stages of their historical development).
I wrote a book about Brotherhood ideology, called The Grand Jihad, in 2010, and another one a couple of years later, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, about the turbulent influence of that ideology during the short-lived uprisings known as “the Arab Spring.” Over the years, I’ve consulted with sundry lawmakers on legislative initiatives to designate the Brotherhood formally as a foreign terrorist organization.
Those efforts were mostly inchoate, and they have petered out in recent years. The failure owes not to the fact that anyone doubts the Brotherhood is real, nor to skepticism that it is a malign force. The problem is nailing down exactly what it is. It manifests itself in many different ways.
The Brotherhood was established in Egypt nearly a century ago as an Islamic competitor to the Muslim world’s various post–World War II lurches toward secularization, Western democracy, and Soviet communism. In Egypt, the Brotherhood was an organization that, by turns, was overt in the manner of a political party, and covert in the manner of a subversive conspiracy.
Over time, it spread regionally and transcontinentally, metastasizing into the most consequential Muslim ideological enterprise in modern history. It adheres to a distinct sharia-supremacist Salafism rooted in centuries of scholarship. I’m not invoking “Salafist” here as an epithet, the way it is commonly used in media — the same way “Wahhabist” was used as an epithet meaning “radical” in the years after 9/11, usually by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The Brotherhood is also supple, particularly in the West: media savvy, versed in civil-rights law, schooled in identity politics and community-organizing tactics, and strategically aligned with leftist grievance groups. That’s a level of sophistication that Antifa lacks in these early years of its existence. (Black Lives Matter, with its roots in 1960s “small-c communism,” is further along.)
Here is the point: The Brotherhood appears as different things in different places. It has countless tentacles, but most of them are not called “the Muslim Brotherhood.” Some are terrorist organizations, like Hamas (which would tell you it is not a terrorist organization but a political entity with a social-justice agenda and a forcible resistance wing). Some are think tanks, like the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Some are self-styled civil-rights groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Some are umbrella groups for all manner of sharia-supremacist activism, like the Islamic Society of North America. Some form up in campus chapters, as parts of the Muslim Students Association. Some, like the Muslim American Society, purport to be the quasi-official presence of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian mother ship. But what the Brotherhood is, for the most part, is a movement that propagates a particular ideology, and that inspires to action everyone from terrorists (such as the Blind Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda’s current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, all of whom had Brotherhood alliances) to celebrity academics (such as Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna) to internationally renowned sharia authorities (such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi).
To label the Muslim Brotherhood a mere “organization,” as if it would be possible to target one iteration of it and put the whole thing out of business, would be to underestimate it at our peril. Indeed, the problem with the American government’s approach to Brotherhood-inspired entities in our own country has been the failure to come to grips with the ideology they represent and facilitate. Our officials tend to take them on their own masquerading terms, as if, say, CAIR really were just a civil-rights organization. Thus, the government rationalizes working with these groups as organizations rather than rejecting them because of the movement they represent.
Regarding Antifa, what Wray appears to be saying is that, if the FBI is going to counter Antifa effectively, it has to recognize, first and foremost, the ideological thread that knits all the militants together. You can’t kill it by arresting ten guys in balaclavas mixing Molotov cocktails in Portland.
If that is the FBI’s logic, it’s not only right; it is progress.
In the Obama years, the government’s willful blindness to the ideological driver of jihadist terrorism was taken to new and absurd extremes. Our officials were cautioned that to take note of sharia supremacism was unconstitutional folly, potentially chilling religious liberty and the rights to assemble and engage in political dissent. It was as if CAIR were writing policy when, as I’ve pointed out a few times, the actual constitutional violation was the administration-backed U.N. Human Rights Resolution 16/18, which attempted to outlaw speech that, even if true and backed by mounds of evidence, could “incite hostility” to Islam.
That, however, was not nearly the worst of it. Obama wanted to project success in quelling the threat of terrorism, even as al-Qaeda thrived and its breakaway faction, ISIS, went on a rampage that gained it control of a swath of Iraqi-Syrian territory larger than Britain. The administration did this by miniaturizing the threat: pretending the animating sharia-supremacist ideology did not exist, and treating the nodes of the terror networks as discrete organizations that were really concerned with regional and local disputes — not anything so bold as global anti-American, anti-Western jihad to establish and expand the dominance of sharia laws and customs.
Like jihad, mujahideen, and other Islamic terms whose utterance in connection with terrorism was verboten, discussion of sharia in connection with Muslim militancy was discouraged. It became vogue to speak of “al-Qaeda ideology.” That is, if a person who was clearly inspired by sharia supremacism committed a mass-murder attack, the Obama administration — very much including the FBI — ludicrously refused to concede that the act was terrorism unless there was some solid evidence “operationally” tying the person to an al-Qaeda entity that had been formally designated as a terrorist organization.
The knock-on effects of consciously avoiding ideology include limiting what the government can legitimately investigate. That approach is an invitation to be attacked: The terrorist is never a terrorist until the government has gotten around to designating him as such, and the threat of violence is never certain until after the violence happens.
Let’s not do that again. In fact, let’s bear in mind that, if Joe Biden is elected, we will be doing it again — instead of confronting enemy ideology, we’ll be back to “countering violent extremism.”
Chris Wray is right. He is not saying that the FBI is making no cases on violent insurrectionists who are driven by Antifa’s anti-American ideology. He is saying that if we’re confronted by a movement, and we want to protect the country, we can’t afford to delude ourselves into thinking we can beat it by taking out any particular organization. It’s bigger and more insidious than that.
Let’s remember one more thing, a lesson we never learned with sharia supremacism. The FBI is a law enforcement agency. It does not, and must not, get involved with ideological threats in the United States until they’ve ripened into crimes — or, at least, into concrete preparation for crimes and conspiracies. That is the end stage. A confident, free society best takes on ideological threats at the early stage: talking about them, examining their ideas, doing real investigative journalism about how they operate, and calling them out and discrediting them. If we’re waiting for the FBI to confront the challenge of anti-American anarchism, then we’re waiting way too long.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
