You would think that the Department of Defense (DoD) would have their hands full right now. The war between Russia and Ukraine drags on, war between Israel and Hamas continues, and China continues its saber-rattling over "reunification" with Taiwan. The United States might not be directly involved in all of those conflicts, but we will have some role to play. The Defense Department is concerned about terrorism. But before you get excited over the fact that there might be someone at the DoD with their priorities straight, think again. They are not worried about the thousands of potential terrorists sneaking across the southern border. They are worried about home-grown terrorists, you know, the right-wing kind.
The DoD's Office of Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) supervises overseas special operations. Recently, they invited "all" office employees to hear Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Jacob Ware, a research fellow at CFR, talk about their book entitled "God, Guns, and Terrorism" on...wait for it...domestic right-wing extremism. It gets better. The Chief of Staff for the SO/LIC Office is a woman named Ariane Tabatabai. She was recently investigated for her ties to an Iranian influence network. It gets even better. Tabatabai is also a founding member of something called the Iranian Experts Initiative. They are a group of analysts who allegedly cooperated with Iran's Islamic regime to promote the official position on Iran's nuclear program in the middle of negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran.
Why Is Iranian Operative Ariane Tabatabai Still Working in the Pentagon?
This latest bit of idiocy from the Biden administration was too much for Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In a joint statement, the two blasted the Biden Defense Department and the SO/LIC Office that read in part,
“Joe Biden’s woke Department of Defense (DoD) wasted $900,000 of taxpayer dollars on a baseless witchhunt to root out ‘Far Right extremism’ in the military and paid Leftist professors to speak on the subject yet took no action against an employee who is a known agent of Iranian extremism. SO/LIC is supposed to be focused on deterring future attacks by Iranian-backed terrorist proxies, not employing an acolyte of the regime. Enough with the woke politics – the DoD should focus on deterring future attacks against American troops."
It is unknown whether the invite to all SO/LIC employees was mandatory. Nor did the email explain why the topic of domestic terrorism was relevant to DoD employees, as domestic terrorism does not fall under their purview. Unfortunately for the DoD, the SO/LIC Office, and Hoffman and Ware, the supply of right-wing extremism does not meet their apparent demand. After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the DoD called for a review of military personnel to weed out any "extremism" within the ranks. Less than 100 members of the military were found to have engaged in any "extremist" activities. But the DoD wasn't convinced. It spent two years hunting down extremists in the military to no avail. The final report on a study that began in 2021 and was quietly released in December of 2023 “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate” to U.S. society."
DOD's 'Military Extremism' Investigation Is a Dud
As for Hoffman and Ware, they might want to do a bit more research. Part of the aim of their book is to tie present-day "right-wing extremism" to the Ku Klux Klan and also to groups reported to be at the Capitol on January 6 into the same narrative. However, the Klan was founded in part as a way for white Southerners to resist Reconstruction-era policies put forth by the Republican Party after the Civil War. It is also important to note that no Jan. 6 protesters have been convicted on domestic terrorism charges.
For the Biden administration, the priority is not the fact that the world is on fire and could get potentially worse and that someone with ties to the Iranian regime is the Chief of Staff in a sensitive office. The priority is to spread what amounts to the new McCarthyism, that there is a domestic terrorist — otherwise known in the Biden administration as a conservative — around every corner. Maybe putting the safety and security of Americans at the top of that priority list would be a better idea.