The King hearings: What did they achieve?

“Smearing minorities is as old as politicking,” said The Seattle Times in an editorial. The latest fraud to “inflame cultural bias for political gain” is Republican Rep. Peter King of Long Island, N.Y., who last week held a transparently bigoted congressional hearing into the threat of “Radicalization in the American Muslim Community.” Rather than calling expert witnesses and considering actual facts, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, King mounted an attack on U.S. Muslims with paranoid rhetoric, thirdhand anecdotes, and made-up statistics—such as the ludicrous, unsourced assertion that 80 percent of U.S. mosques are run by radicals. Unfortunately for King, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca testified that seven of the past 10 known terrorist plots involving al Qaida were foiled by information provided by Muslim Americans. And the hearings’ one “indelible moment” came from Rep. Keith Ellison, one of two Muslims in Congress, who broke down in tears telling the story of a young American Muslim who died trying to rescue his fellow citizens from the Twin Towers on 9/11. That Muslim man, Ellison said, was “an American who gave everything for his fellow Americans.”

Don’t blame King because “there’s an association between terrorism and Islam,” said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. Blame Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, “and all the other homegrown extremists who have perpetrated or attempted mayhem in the name of Allah.” King called as witnesses two men whose family members became radicalized in the U.S. When Abdirizak Bihi, one of the men, told Muslim leaders in Minneapolis that he was going to warn law enforcement about his radical nephew, “they threatened me, intimidated me,” Bihi testified. It’s not bigotry to point out that Islam is infected with extremists who believe in “uncompromising violence as a political tool,” said David Harsanyi in The Denver Post. That’s just reality. No less liberal a figure than Attorney General Eric Holder has admitted that the special threat posed by radicalized Muslims within our own borders is “one of the few things keeping him up at night.” So why, other than “political correctness,” should those charged with protecting us be barred from discussing the topic?

But why “single out Islam for investigation?” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. As King personally knows, other ethnic groups and religions have radical strains, too; during the 1980s, the very same Peter King was an outspoken supporter of the Irish Republican Army, and even justified the IRA’s terrorist bombing of British civilians. Muslims “have no monopoly on mayhem.” Indeed, the majority of ideologically motivated attacks on U.S. soil in recent decades have come from white supremacists, pro-life Christian zealots, and anti-government militia types. The government “has no business examining any peaceful religious group” for the crimes of a few bad apples, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. If it did, King should conduct hearings into the Roman Catholic Church, complicit in the sexual abuse of an estimated 100,000 children since 1950. The truth, of course, is that Islamist extremists no more represent the Muslim community than a pedophile priest does all priests, or all Catholics.

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U.S. Muslims aren’t to blame for the sins of homegrown jihadists, said Christine Flowers in the Philadelphia Daily News, but “far too many either support or refuse to condemn the actions committed in the name of their religion.” I fully understand why. Growing up as an Italian-American, I would bristle defensively at any mention of the Mafia, but I realize that was naïve of me. The Mafia may have been a tiny rogue element, but it was a tiny rogue element of my community. The goal of King’s hearings was not to besmirch all Muslims, but to galvanize the peace-loving majority of U.S. Muslims against the extremists.

If that was the goal, said Joe Conason in the Portland Oregonian, King’s hearings were a “gross waste of taxpayers’ money and public attention.” He produced no information about the threat of homegrown Islamic radicalism or how to counteract it—other than to suggest that “the entire community is to blame.” If he really wanted to shed light, King would have called as an expert witness Ray Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. Kelly has spent the past decade building strong relationships with Muslim community leaders, and hiring Arabic-speaking officers. The city’s counterterrorism unit, not coincidentally, has thwarted more than a dozen plots since 9/11. “Reaching out, not pushing away”—that’s an approach King might try the next time he’s up on his soapbox.