The U.S. is in a “dangerous period” according to the FBI Director
Using the FBI as a counter-terrorism agent: a Palestinian asylum seeker in the United States may be an inspiration to al Qaeda and its allies
The FBI agent is concerned about traditional terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the like, potentially carrying out strikes in the US.
Mr. Wray said the actions of Hamas and its allies would be an inspiration to the likes of which they have not seen since the launch of the so-called caliphate.
On the home front, Wray said the biggest concern for the FBI is that violent extremists — including people inspired by foreign terrorist groups but also domestic violent extremists — will draw inspiration from the ongoing conflict to carry out attacks against Americans.
He said violent extremists were also targeting Jewish or Muslim communities, as well as being inspired by foreign terrorist organizations.
Mr. Wray pointed to an arrest in Houston on Oct. 19 of a Palestinian asylum seeker who had been in the United States since June 2019 on a travel visa that expired a few months later. Mr. Wray said that the man, who prosecutors identified as Sohaib Abuayyash, 20, had been studying how to build bombs and posted details online about his support for killing Jewish people.
He had been in contact with others who share a radical mindset, trained with weapons to commit an attack and was illegally in possession of a firearm, according to the criminal complaint.
The Anti-Defamation League reported that there were more antisemitic acts in the United States between October 7 and October 23. A report was made on Oct. 15 at Grand Central Terminal when someone punched a woman in the face because she was Jewish.
Over the same time period, the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization, said it received more than 700 complaints, including reported bias incidents, since Oct. 7.
The Time for Vigilance in the Context of the Middle East and Africa: A Commentary on the Israel-Hamas War
“We are not currently tracking an imminent, credible threat from a foreign terrorist organization, a structured attack here or something like that, but it is something that we think heightened vigilance is warranted for,” he said.
The war between Israel and Hamas has been used in messages and propaganda, according to Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“We’ve seen it from al-Qaida affiliates, almost every single one of them,” she told lawmakers, referring to terrorist groups in the Mideast and Africa with ties to al-Qaida. “We’ve also seen it from ISIS, which isn’t ideologically aligned with a group like Hamas but is still leveraging this current conflict to try to sow the kind of violence, bring adherence to its cause in a kind of exploitative way.”
“This is not a time for panic, but it is a time for vigilance,” he said. We shouldn’t stop going to schools, houses of worship or anything like that. But we should be vigilant.”
There is no evidence that the US has any information that Iran or its proxy Hezbollah knew of the attack.
She said the US has remained focused on Iran and its allies since the start of the war. She noted that the groups aligned with Iran have attacked American forces in Iraq and Syria.
“We assess Iran, Hezbollah and their linked proxies are trying to calibrate their activity, avoiding actions that would open up a concerted second front with the U.S. or Israel while still exacting costs in the midst of the current conflict,” she said.
“This is a very fine line to walk and, in the present regional context, their actions carry the potential for miscalculation thus requiring heightened scrutiny in the region and we monitor for signs that the conflict could spread.”
On the domestic front, she said she has no indications of any Iranian threat inside the U.S., though she cautioned that Iran has a “significant escalatory capability” that it could call on if Tehran decided it wanted to ramp up the conflict.
The Times of Gaza: The U.S. Post-September 11, 2001 War, and the Perception of the Middle East as a Faithful Nation
The comparison, which emerged widely and immediately, seemed apt on the surface: a brutal attack that shocked a nation and changed the course of its history. The same patterns we saw after Sept. 11, 2001 are now playing out. The mourning of a terrorist attack has been interrupted by the swift bombardment of civilian neighborhoods. American officials, pundits and companies have come to Israel’s defense in the midst of its war on Gaza, which has become more intense by the day. Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza than the United States did in the first week of the war. Civilian casualties in Gaza have climbed exponentially. The recent images of Palestinians being tied, blindfolded, stripped, and allegedly subjected to attempted sexual assault by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank are reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.
What happened to the Muslim community in the United States after Sept. 11 — the surveillance, the targeting, the fear — was intimately tied to many Americans’ belief in the righteousness of what our government was doing abroad. The public perception of Muslims in America plummeted to new lows when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. A year after the Iraq invasion, a majority of Americans believed that Islam was more likely to encourage violence than other religions. By 2014, Muslims ranked lowest in another Pew poll of how the American public views different religious groups.
Over 8,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war and these long-held suspicions are coming back to haunt the public. There is a false connection between supporting civilians in Gaza and the terrorist activities of Hamas. From college campuses to places of work, people are facing retribution for expressing support for Palestinians that is being misconstrued as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas. Companies have pulled job offers, journalists have been terminated and students whose organizations have released statements have become the butt of jokes. The scale of suppression of speech by social media platforms, such as the shadow banning of Gaza-related posts and the blocking of accounts on Instagram, has been alarming enough that Human Rights Watch has started to document it.
The day after the attacks, the first Friday of October, New York City and the other metropolitan areas were on high alert as a former leader of Hamas called for protests in support of the Palestinians. I was going to visit the Islamic center in New York expecting a tense and nervous congregation. Instead, an imam finished his speech, and the women around me lined up to pray. As we knelt together, all I could hear was sobs.
Some people who have no sympathies with either Hamas or terrorism look at recent accounts of atrocities. “We always hear of something terrible when they want to go to war — how convenient,” one acquaintance told me recently.
One particularly gruesome twist is that there has been an uproar over whether Hamas had beheaded babies, a claim that President Biden repeated before the White House walked it back, and which has been subject to much discussion since.
The Israeli War against ISIS: Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians in the Uproar and Back-and-Forth: How Israel Killed a Gaza Hospital in 2014
One key reason for some of the incidents of doubt is the suspicion that horrendous but false or exaggerated claims are being used as a rationale for war — and there are many such historical examples, most notably the Iraq war.
After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy. Muslims around the world denounced these attacks even if they opposed the U.S. policies. (The idea that Muslims widely celebrated the attacks has been repeatedly shown to be false or traces back to a few instances of dubious clarity.)
The United States chose to wage a war in Iraq that was reckless and destructive in nature because they wanted to get revenge against the extremists, even though they had lied about weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration lied before the war and after it to hurt the reputation of the United States and its allies.
People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation of ISIS a decade later.
The Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying their responsibility for the atrocities that eventually proved to be its doing.
In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli airstrikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.
Israel investigated and found no wrongdoing. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”
The Telegraph said that some journalists who had witnessed the bombing said there had been no attempt to interview them.
Two weeks ago, Hamas claimed that a missile hit a hospital courtyard in Gaza, and this history will play out in the global upheaval. Israeli and American officials said that the missile came from within Gaza. There was initial reports that 500 people were killed in the hospital blast. Then the number was challenged, leading to another round of uproar and back-and-forth.
It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The evidence isn’t conclusive either way, and the truth remains unknown.
Even though the US estimates that hundreds are dead in the hospital blast, a squabble over exact numbers is cruel to a family that lost loved ones.
But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.
The United States had not shaken “Vietnam syndrome” by not going to war after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the idea of a new war was very unpopular in the country.
A teenager told Congress in 1990 that she saw Iraqi solders take premature babies out of incubators and leave them to die on the cold floor, a shocking assertion repeated by many high-level officials. Officials and the media continued to repeat the claim.
The daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the US was the witness who gave false testimony, and it was probably done by a public relations firm that works for the Kuwait government.
The effort to sell the war was hampered by the shocking fabrication. It was not necessary to keep the oil fields in the hands of the rulers of a tiny country created during the early 20th century. It is more persuasive to oppose an army that commits the most unthinkable crimes.
Ordinary people’s loss and pain are seen as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and pain for others, and lead to widespread distrust and dehumanization.
There are many parallels of this on social media. “Hamas beheaded babies, Saddam had WMD and I’m the last unicorn,” one person posted on X. Another one said, “The ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ lie is equivalent to the WMD’s lie.”
I was positive that Human Rights Watch independently verified some of the videos of the horror, and they called it deliberate killings. The attacks were denounced by the group as cruel and brutal crimes, including mass summary killings, hostage-taking. Both organizations have called for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.
Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so, especially by the government of Israel and some NGOs and lawmakers.
These are voices that need to be heard. In a context where many in the region and world already see the United States as reflexively supporting Israel, no matter its conduct, President Biden might consider elevating such independent human rights voices rather than embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Source: Opinion | The Memories That Feed Distrust in the Middle East
Damned kidnappings and the killings of innocent civilians: The Palestinians need to be treated as human as they should be
As Amnesty International states, kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.
But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that violent extremists, including people inspired by foreign terrorist groups but also domestic violent extremists, will draw inspiration from the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict to carry out attacks against Americans. “We are not currently tracking an imminent, credible threat from a foreign terrorist organisation, a structured attack…but it is something that we think heightened vigilance is warranted for,” he added.