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Peter King Convenes His Radicalization Hearing

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on March 10, 2011.

03-10-2011 by L. S. Carbonell

Rep. Peter King

Before he started his hunt for the radical imams he claims are in charge of 80% of the mosques in America, Rep. Peter King excused his involvement with the IRA by saying that “they never attacked America, did they?” and “they never targeted civilians.” He was not asked, because the person interviewing him either was not going to challenge him or didn’t know, exactly which military installation was at the Manchester shopping center where 200 were injured by an IRA bomb. King also revealed that he has been receiving extraordinary security protection since December, a month before he took his post as the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He has been protected around the clock by the police in New York City and Nassau County, Long Island, where his district is, and by the Capitol Police while in Washington. King claims that the protection is necessary because the police have detected a high threat level against him due to these hearings. On Don Imus’ radio show, King said, “All kidding aside, it’s hard to figure out – whether the attacks are coming from Kim Kardashian or The New York Times – it seems to be just a hysterical type attack that I’m out to demonize Muslims, that some are saying I want to set up internment camps, that it’s a religious war.” Well, maybe if he hadn’t insisted that 80% of all of America’s mosques are headed by radical imams, he might not have pissed off so many people. Maybe if he hadn’t started off his hearings by claiming that not a single non-Muslim attack has happened in America, he might not have pissed off so many people. We have to remember, he’s a Republican. Shooting and killing abortion doctors isn’t terrorism to him. Attacking mosques isn’t terrorism to him. His information about terrorism in America is as selective as his understanding of the true nature of the IRA.

Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim ever elected to the House of Representatives, gave an emotional statement that we have linked to here. Just reporting it isn’t enough. You need to watch him.

We do need to discuss the radicalization of young men by Muslim extremists. That’s understandable. We need to try to understand what would make an American believe that he needs to attack his own nation. King is starting at the wrong end of this problem. He’s looking at the young men who were radicalized and not at the climate that King himself is promoting.

Go on the comment streams of Yahoo News and hold on to your stomach. You will see posts calling for the nuking of all Muslim nations, posts demanding that we deport all Muslims, posts suggesting that the best thing to do with Muslims is shoot them. You will read posts that call Allah a “monkey god” and say that the Prophet was a pedophile, and that’s just the stuff I can repeat on this site. Then, listen to right wing commentators for a while. Bill O’Reilly is just the tip of the iceberg. He’s actually fairly mild compared to the ones on radio. Google the attacks on mosques, the towns that are refusing building permits for mosques, the lines of people who stand outside of mosques and scream “go home!” at the people entering the mosques. You can, if you wish, go back to 2003 or ‘04 and find Ann Coulter columns in which she grossly misquoted the Qur’an, attaching chapter and sura numbers to words that don’t exist in the Qur’an, and because her readers don’t own Qur’ans, they believed her. You can find misquotes of the Qur’an almost everywhere, starting with the word that the right translates as “infidel” and which is accurately translated as “pagan.”

You never hear anyone quoting those parts of the Qur’an that speak of never harming “the children of the book” – Jews and Christians. You never hear how Jews found refuge in Moorish Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages in Europe. Newt Gingrich totally twisted the history of Cordoba. You don’t see very many people in the public eye explaining that Allah is the Arabic word for God. Jon Stewart is one of the few people who has said that “madrassa” is Arabic for “school.” No one is explaining that “sharia” is not terrorist training, but a set of laws as broad as those found in the Torah.

I grew up during some of the worst days of the racial discord in this country, the days of the real Black Panthers, not those pathetic hamster-imitators in Philadelphia. As horrible as their crimes were, the things that radicalized those young men were all around me. I spent my first seven years one block from the Queens, New York, street that separated the black and white neighborhoods. The “multi-cultural suburb” that Bill O’Reilly says we grew up in was pure white. “Multi-cultural” in the parlance of the 1950′s meant you might have a third-generation Italian-American family living next to a third-generation Irish family instead of in the segregated neighborhoods of “the city” we had all moved from. Long Island, New York – that big fish shaped thing that juts out on the map south of Connecticut – was as segregated as the Deep South. Affluent “colored folks” lived in the segregated suburb of Roosevelt. All the rest were left behind in a city that was literally rotting away. Taking unemployed, disenfranchised, bitter young men from those circumstances, it was very easy to radicalize them. It was also very easy to train them to see bigotry where it didn’t exist, to feel slighted by every casual glance, to stay at a level of barely controlled anger all the time.

King’s hearing will not focus on how the climate in this country, added to our unwarranted invasion of two sovereign nations, helps to create the climate where radicalization is possible. He will focus only on the act of radicalization.

King had photos of the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon hung in the committee chamber. Why the hell do people like King think that anyone who lived through that day will ever forget it? What gives him the right to think he’s the damned guardian of the memory? That’s how King set the stage for his political theater. King’s “witnesses” did not include any of the members of the law enforcement community that he has repeated stated have told him, in private of course, that all those imams are radicals. Instead, he called the families of two young men who were radicalized. By the time we had finished invading Afghanistan we already knew how individuals are radicalized and that as they become radicalized, they separate themselves from the people who could report them to authorities. We had that with John Walker Lindh, whose family had no idea he was in Afghanistan and with the shoe bomber Richard Reed who was so far outside the al Qaida organization that the Brits didn’t know he existed. We have heard the story over and over in the past ten years, that these men isolated themselves.

If Peter King wants to see why young men are being radicalized, he has only to listen to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sharron Angle or the idiot Duncan on his own committee who insisted that sharia law is taking over America. If they were attacking white, middle-aged pan-theist feminists, I’d be radicalized too.