"Terrorism Has a Return Address" Topic

"In the space of one week, the Trump administration put three documents on the table, and the argument about them went straight to the wrong question. On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened diplomats from sixty-six countries for a summit on far-left political terrorism. On July 20, the State Department released a hundred-page report on Cuba. Together with the Counterterrorism Strategy the president signed in May, they make one claim. Critics answered a different one.

The fight everyone is having is domestic and rhetorical: Is antifa really terrorism, or is this a president criminalizing people he does not like? That is a fair fight, and it is the wrong one. The three documents do not rest their case on whether you find a protester sympathetic. They make a national-security claim — that a hostile foreign network has spent decades building an apparatus inside the United States. That claim is either true or it is not, and it should be judged on the evidence for it, not on the politics around it.

Sixty-six countries did not send delegations over an American culture-war argument. They came because of a pattern on their own soil. Two weeks before the summit, coordinated firebombings struck the homes of governing-party officials in Thessaloniki, Greece, and killed a woman in her seventies. This past winter, an attack on Berlin's power grid left tens of thousands of households dark in the cold and an elderly woman dead. German officials reported far-left violence up more than forty percent in a year; in Greece, officials put the far-left and anarchist share of political violence above eighty percent. Whatever one makes of the American framing, the events abroad are not in doubt…"

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Armand