Tag: ira

Tomorrow New York Republican Rep. Peter King will open his Homeland Security Committee hearings on the question of whether or not Muslim-Americans are doing enough to help safeguard the nation from terrorism. The hearings have been pilloried as an exercise in attention-grabbing ethnic-baiting and scapegoating and as an essentially unfair government-sanctioned exercise in Islamophobia. After all, what ethnic group in America is doing enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism? Could any group -- much less a loosely affiliated ethnic or religious group-- do enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism? King has responded to such criticism by doubling down. He has rearranged the committee schedule to ratchet up its partisan circus quality and he has dismissed his own past as an unabashed supporter of the terrorist Irish Republican Army.