As people grow increasingly wary of dangers around them, a split-screen has again opened up on how the Left and Right approach the threat of terrorism. On the Left, you have the Army being trained on the purported terrorist threat posed by Christian pro-lifers. On the other, elected officials are finally probing pro-Hamas groups.
The pro-life groups presented as terrorist threats to U.S. Army soldiers were National Right to Life and Operation Rescue, two Christian-based groups with zero history of violence. The pro-Hamas groups that Republican state and federal elected officials want probed organized violent protests in U.S. campuses and cities to advocate Hamas, a Gaza-based Iranian proxy group that the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization.
First the snake-bitten Army presentation. It came during a briefing to soldiers on Wednesday, July 10, at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, formerly known as Fort Bragg. Leaked photos showed that the PowerPoint presentation in question compared the two pro-life groups with terrorist groups such as ISIS and with the Klu Klux Klan.
Somebody in attendance took a photo of the slide, and an investigative journalist posted it on X. It was so outrageous it instantly went viral, garnering 1.6 million views. The “slide you see here followed right after a slide about ISIS, a terror group in the Middle East,” the post said.
The X post added that the slide “also falsely attributed the bombing of abortion clinics to National Right to Life.”
National Right to Life is not some unknown, shadowy group. It is “the nation’s oldest and largest pro-life organization,” a “federation of 50 state right-to-life affiliates, the District of Columbia and more than 3,000 local chapters,” according to its website.
The training rightly prompted an outcry from the public and Republicans in Congress. The House Armed Services Committee said on X that it was demanding action.
As is usually the case when these disgraceful events are leaked to the public, the Army quickly disavowed the slides and promised to do better.
“The slides were developed by a local garrison employee to train soldiers manning access control points at Fort Liberty,” an Army spokesman told Military.com. “These slides will no longer be used, and all future training products will be reviewed to ensure they align with the current DoD anti-terrorism guidance.”
The online news outlet said the Army was launching a “15-6 investigation,” which is military speak for investigations that “find facts, document and preserve evidence, and then report the facts and evidence to the approval authority.”
But instances of woke military activities and biased political action have been nothing new in the past few years. Consider, for example, the Navy reading list that included critical race theory trainers Ibram X. Kendi in 2021 and the futile search for right-wing extremists in the armed services in 2022.
Now contrast this with what is happening with the Virginia government and the U.S. House of Representatives, where serious efforts are underway to investigate actual terrorist supporters.
A circuit court in Richmond, Virginia, on July 16 agreed with the state’s attorney general Jason Miyares and ordered American Muslims for Palestine to provide him with records of donor records and funding streams, according to journalist Adam Kredo.
Miyares had “acted in good faith” and his request was “was entirely in [his] statutory authority,” the court ruled. This was a victory for Miyares, who said when requesting the information on the funding streams that AMP “may have used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations.”
AMP is one of the leading organizers of the protests that rocked campuses earlier this year and closed off critical urban infrastructure such as the Brooklyn Bridge. It advocates the destruction of the state of Israel and supports the positions of Hamas.
As Mary Mobley and I explained in a Heritage Foundation study published last month, “American Muslims for Palestine was formed in 2005 by individuals who belonged to groups shut down by the U.S. government for being fronts for the Islamic terrorist group Hamas.”
The group mixes anti-Israel and pro-Hamas militancy with more Marxist-styled rhetoric. AMP executive director Osama Abu Irshaid told the encampment at George Washington University in May that university administrators “are trying to destroy you before you succeed in bringing this imperialism to an end.” America and its “elite colleges,” he said, “are only structures in an imperial project. Israel is only another structure in an imperial project. Zionism is no less evil than white supremacy or any other type of supremacy.”
Our Heritage study led Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) to fire off a letter to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Danny Werfel, saying that “the report describes a network of donors, activists, and media outlets that had helped organize many of the violent anti-police riots during the summer of 2020, and that, more recently, have organized many of the ongoing anti-Israel protests and encampments on college campuses. Most troublingly, the report includes details about many of these organizations’ ties to foreign terrorist groups.”
“Based on this information, I urge the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to immediately begin an audit of these organizations’ 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) statuses,” Banks added.
It should be easy to see which of these organizations pose a threat to society and which don’t. The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has brought home to many people the dangers that lurk in the dark, and it is up to institutions, such as governments at different levels and the different branches of the armed forces, to keep citizens safe.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation.
