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The barbaric attack on Israeli civilians over the weekend by Hamas terrorists has left people wondering, as we often do after mass tragedies: How did no one see this coming? As a surprisingly sophisticated, coordinated surprise attack left nearly 1,000 people dead and countless more innocents wounded or kidnapped, anyone can recognize the massive intelligence failure without calling into question who is morally culpable for the invasion. Iran-backed militants attacked civilians from multiple points of entry, hang-gliding into a music festival and dragging the bodies of murdered women through the streets, all effectively livestreamed on the internet.

It wasnt just an intel failure on Israels part as a close ally with an intelligence presence all over the world, the United States also failed to foresee the attack. A senior U.S. military official admitted to NBC News that We were not tracking this. CIA counterterrorism veteran Marc Polymeropoulos told the outlet he was stunned that American intel agencies were caught off guard.

Intelligence operatives are fallible, yes. But instead of identifying the threat from Hamas terrorists, the Biden administration was busy sending money to their state sponsors in Iran and employing Iranian conspirators at the Pentagon.

Theres another task thats been keeping Americas so-called counterterrorism apparatus busy lately, though. Instead of focusing their efforts on actual terrorists those abroad and those doubtless infiltrating our porous southern border the Biden administration has continued, and escalated, the trend of turning our post-9/11 surveillance state against Americans, smearing them as terrorists for their political beliefs.

Just last week, Newsweek reported that the FBI is targeting Trump supporters as domestic terrorists ahead of the 2024 election. The universal line from the Biden administration is that domestic terrorism and its aliases all of which are used as code for political right-wingers are the No. 1 threat to national security. The effort to make an example out of Trump supporters who demonstrated at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is only one of numerous instances in which Democrats within and beyond intelligence agencies are working to equate domestic terrorism with their political opponents.

Two years ago, Bidens Education Department infamously planted a letter from the National School Boards Association to Attorney General Merrick Garland, urging him to target concerned parents who showed up at school board meetings to protest Democrats Covid policies and their racialist and sexually graphic curricula in public schools. The letter smeared those parents as domestic terror threats and urged the Department of Justice to wield counterterrorism laws against them, and Garland happily acted on the suggestion.

A few months later, the politicized Department of Justiceannounceda new domestic terrorism unit to deal with an elevated threat from domestic violence extremists, including those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.(Who knew the Founding Fathers were domestic terrorists?)

Taking things a step further, disgraced former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe claimed that targeting the fringes of the right-wing movement was insufficient to catch this threat, and instead called for federal suspicion of mainstream conservatives.

In June 2021, the Biden administration released a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. It proposed to counter domestic terrorism by addressing underlying racism and bigotry and they werent talking about the racism that led Hamas militants to slaughter Israeli civilians this past weekend and has driven violence against Israel in the region for decades. A National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin issued the same year lumped conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud and responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases in the same sentence as domestic violent extremist ideologies.

Our intelligence apparatus expends resources on things like telling Big Tech companies which free-thinking Americans social media posts to censor, as we discovered via the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden. Its actively researching how to most efficiently surveil what you say online. The FBI has been putting its resources to work targeting and likely infiltrating traditional Catholic congregations, and terrorizing peaceful pro-lifers like Mark Houck, a pastor who was dragged away in a surprise raid at his home in front of his family.

Its not just domestic intel agencies being wielded against Americans; the CIA did its part to help Twitter censor speech, and even solicited signatures to help falsely smear damaging reporting about the Biden family as disinformation ahead of the 2020 election. (For some reason, none of those involved are being arrested for conspiracy against voting rights.)

Across the board, weve seen the people we elected, and countless bureaucrats we did not, weaponizing supposedly counterterror laws like the Patriot Act against Americans First and Fourth Amendment freedoms (at least).

Imagine if those resources were redirected away from targeting ordinary, law-abiding Americans for their political views and aimed at stopping actual terrorists who seek to harm us and our allies. Contrary to the pretense that surveilling Americans as walking national security threats is for our own protection, our world would be a lot safer.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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Imagine If Feds Hunted More Real Terrorists, Not Conservatives - The Federalist