Bringing Counterterrorism Back Home

The FBI is watching right-wing extremism very closely, says counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. “January 6 was a wake-up call,” he told an audience of Jewish academics, writers, community leaders, and others during a recent Zoom call that I sat in on, hosted by Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. “It should add to your unease.”

As director of Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization who also taught at the International Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Hoffman’s message to worried American Jews is that they’re not scared enough. What Hoffman is trying to do is to scare American Jews into believing that Trump supporters—meaning roughly 75 million Americans, or half of the electorate—are domestic terrorists and violent white supremacists. Worst of all, according to Hoffman, is that there’s not much to be done to stop them. He recommended a service that will scrub your information from the internet. Otherwise, if the red-baseball-cap-wearing hordes come for you, you’re on your own.

Antisemitic extremists are real, and they live on both the left and the right. It was a white supremacist who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Indeed, white supremacism and right-wing antisemitism, from the Ku Klux Klan to Charles Lindbergh, are deeply embedded in American history, even if by now we’d hoped to transcend them. But are they more dangerous today than ever before in American history? It may seem so, but only if you are ignorant of that history—or pursuing an agenda that threatens to endanger American Jews, rather than protect them from harm.