When I wrote recently that King was caving to political correctness and Islamic supremacist intimidation and smear tactics, and that his hearings were shaping up to be useless, many people on the anti-jihad side told me that I was all wrong, for he was calling Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she would tell the truth.
So what now? All that’s left is a man who, as the Times understatedly puts it, has “little following among Muslims,” the Islamic supremacist obstructionist group MPAC, and Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Muslim Brotherhood). If anything good comes out of these hearings now, it will be by accident.
“Muslims to Be Congressional Hearings’ Main Focus,” by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times, February 7 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Monday that he planned to call mostly Muslim and Arab witnesses to testify in hearings next month on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism.
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said he would rely on Muslims to make his case that American Muslim leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement officials in the effort to disrupt terrorist plots — a claim that was rebutted in recent reports by counterterrorism experts and in a forum on Capitol Hill on Monday.
“I believe it will have more of an impact on the American people if they see people who are of the Muslim faith and Arab descent testifying,” Mr. King said.
Pamela Geller points out what’s wrong with this: “I imagine it will be quite difficult for Muslims to testify against their own community and then return to live in those very communities. One only has to recall the Muslim who called for a protest outside the arraignment of the Christmas Day bomber in Detroit, only to have a death fatwa issued against him the following day.”
The hearings, which Mr. King said would start the week of March 7, have provoked an uproar from both the left and the right. The left has accused Mr. King of embarking on a witch hunt. The right has accused him of capitulation for calling Muslims like Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, to testify while denying a platform to popular critics of Islamic extremism like Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.
As the hearings approach, the reaction from Muslim groups — initially outraged — has evolved into efforts to get Mr. King to enlarge the scope of the hearings beyond Muslims. They want to use the forum to reinforce the notion that the potential for terrorist violence among American Muslims is very marginal and very isolated.
“Our heads aren’t in the sand,” Alejandro J. Beutel, the government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national advocacy group, said at a forum his group sponsored on Monday on Capitol Hill. “The threat clearly exists, but I also want to put it in perspective. The threat exists, but it is not a pandemic.”
No, their heads are not in the sand. They know exactly what they’re doing. The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) created a fraudulent database greatly exaggerating Muslim cooperation with law enforcement. And MPAC’s vaunted National Anti-Terrorism Council focused less on rooting out jihadists from within American Muslim communities than on protecting Muslims from uncomfortable attention from law enforcement.
Fifty-one Muslim, civil rights and interfaith groups sent a letter last week to Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, protesting Mr. King’s hearings as modern-day McCarthyism. They said that if Congress was going to investigate violent extremism, it should investigate extremists of all kinds and not just Muslims.
“Singling out a group of Americans for government scrutiny based on their faith is divisive and wrong,” said the letter, which was led by Muslim Advocates, a legal and policy organization in San Francisco, and was signed by non-Muslim groups including Amnesty International USA, the Interfaith Alliance and the Japanese American Citizens League.
Mr. Ellison said that while he would participate, “I’m going to make it clear that I challenge the premise of the hearings.
“If you put every single Muslim in the U.S. in jail, it wouldn’t have stopped Jared Loughner,” Mr. Ellison said, referring to the man accused of opening fire on an Arizona congresswoman and her constituents. “It wouldn’t have stopped the young man who killed his classmates at Virginia Tech. It wouldn’t have stopped the bombing in Oklahoma City or the man who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”
First, note Ellison’s hysterical fearmongering: once again, an Islamic supremacist accuses his foes of doing exactly what he himself is doing. Neither King nor anyone else is talking about jailing “every single Muslim in the U.S.” Note also the implication of Ellison’s complaint: that to focus on Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism is to imply that no one from any other group ever does anything evil. It’s ridiculous, but it does confuse the easily foolable. King’s hearings would not have stopped Loughner or Tim McVeigh, but would Ellison be complaining if King were holding hearings about “right-wing extremism”? (Which is not to say that Loughner and McVeigh were in any sense “right-wing extremists,” contrary to media myth.) If King were holding hearings on “right-wing extremism,” would Ellison be complaining that jailing “right-wing extremists” wouldn’t stop Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber? What do you think?
But Mr. King dismissed this line of criticism, saying: “I totally reject that. That, to me, is political correctness at its worst. If we included these other violent events in the hearings, we’d be sending the false signal that we think there’s a security threat equivalency between Al Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or Al Qaeda and gun groups. There is none.”
Mr. King added, “I’m not going to dilute the hearings by including other extremists.”
In fact, he said he planned to hold three or four more hearings this year on topics like the radicalization of Muslims in prisons and Saudi financing for American mosques.
He said the only witness he had settled on for certain of the three he would call in the first hearing was Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor from Arizona and an American military veteran who has little following among Muslims but has become a favorite of conservatives for his portrayal of American Muslim leaders as radical Islamists.
Mr. King said he had changed his mind about summoning as a witness Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist critic of Islam who became a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and then fled because of threats on her life.
The hearings, Mr. King said, would be organized into panels of witnesses, one of them to include members of Congress. He said Mr. Ellison would serve as a witness on that panel. He said he did not expect to call any of the local law enforcement or counterintelligence experts who he said had told him repeatedly that noncooperation by American Muslims is a “significant issue.” He says they will say these things privately, but not in public.
And why is that, exactly? Maybe for the same reason that King has deep-sixed any witnesses who are likely to tell him anything useful?
How good a witness on the “radicalization” of Muslims in the U.S. will Keith Ellison be? Well, as I first noted in December 2008, Ellison’s Hajj was paid for with $13,350 from the Muslim American Society.
The Muslim American Society is the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief operating arm in the U.S.: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” — Chicago Tribune, 2004, via the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.
And the Brotherhood’s agenda in the U.S. is subversive: the Muslim Brothers “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” — “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991.
So a man who took money from a group dedicated to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” is now Peter King’s chief witness on how much progress is being made toward that goal. If King had been a Congressman in 1943 and was holding hearings about Nazi activity in America, would he have called Fritz Kuhn to testify?