Tag: peter king

Last week’s Homeland Security Committee hearing on the extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community — which Chair Peter King (R-NY) said repeatedly would be the first of many hearings on the subject, though no new ones have been introduced — was, as promised, a media circus.

New York Republican Congressman Peter King said the point of the controversial Homeland Security Committee "Islamic radicalization" hearings he is holding this week is to discover how Muslim Americans can help fight terrorism. He got an answer from Keith Ellison, a Muslim Representative from Minnesota, who broke down this morning and sobbed during testimony. He told the story of Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Muslim 23-year-old paramedic and New York City police cadet who helped America fight terrorism by doing his job and rushing to the Twin Towers on 9/11 and giving up his life to try to save the people trapped inside.

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.

The headline-getting dubious recent Pew Research Poll that reported 20 percent of Americans believe the President is Muslim had CNN reporting the fact that...