A much-anticipated Congressional hearing on homegrown Islamic terrorism — lambasted by critics as a throwback to McCarthyism — gets under way Thursday on Capitol Hill, featuring testimony from a Muslim member of Congress, the Los Angeles County sheriff and the relatives of two young men who embraced extremist violence.
The hearing, convened by Representative Peter T. King, the Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and represents parts of Long Island, is the first in a series that Mr. King says will explore the threat of Islamic fundamentalism inside the United States. The session, titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response” will also examine what the congressman asserts is the failure of some Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement.
Muslims and some law enforcement officials fear such a line of inquiry could be explosive, and Mr. King has been under intense pressure from critics to either delay the hearing or broaden its scope. He has said repeatedly that he has no intention of doing so — a message he reiterated Wednesday in an e-mail to supporters.
“There have been numerous protests and newspaper articles demonizing these hearings,” Mr. King wrote, “but I wanted to let you know that will not back down to the hysteria created by my opponents and will continue with the hearings.”
Mr. King’s detractors say it is he, not they, who are doing the demonizing. “I don’t see any hysteria; I see some real legitimate questions going on about why he is taking this approach,” Laura Murphy, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union here, said an interview Wednesday. “He started shaking the tree and these are the apples that are falling out.”
Controversy over the hearings has been building for weeks. Many Muslims fear they will be made targets, while religious and civil rights leaders are protesting what they see as ethnic profiling and the singling out of a particular minority. On Wednesday, a group of rabbis announced that they were starting a video campaign titled “Stand Together: Rabbis speak out against Islamophobia.”
Because counterterrorism officials rely on the cooperation of Muslims for tips and to foil plots, some law enforcement authorities are also raising alarms. They are concerned that the sessions will have the opposite of their intended effect, by making Muslims, who may already be nervous about talking to the authorities, even more nervous about doing so.
To drive home that point, Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is his party’s senior member on the Homeland Security Committee, invited Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles County, who has deep ties with the Muslim community there, to be the Democrats’ lead witness.
“My witness is the only law enforcement person on the panel,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview Wednesday. “He has an understanding of working in the Muslim community, and his experience is that Muslims by and large are law-abiding people, and so to single them out in any kind of hearing is not good public policy.”
Other witnesses will include Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, who is Muslim and has branded the hearings “McCarthyistic”; Representatives Frank Wolf, Republican of Virginia, and John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, whose districts includes large Muslim populations; and M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of a group called the American Islamic Forum For Democracy, who has been deeply critical of some fellow Muslims.
But the witnesses who will attract perhaps the most interest are the two relatives of young men who, Mr. King has said, were recruited by terrorist groups.
One is Abdirizak Bihi, who runs the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis. His nephew, he has said, was among a group of young Somalis lured back to their native country by an Islamic extremist group, the Al Shabab. While there, the boy was killed.
The other is Melvin Bledsoe of Memphis, whose son, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, became a deeply observant Muslim in college. Mr. Muhammad traveled to Yemen to study Arabic, but later returned to the United States; in 2009, while working for his father’s tour bus company, he opened fire on a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., killing one soldier and wounding another. He later sent a note to a judge saying he was a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist group in Yemen.
In an interview Sunday evening, Mr. King said the two witnesses would detail “how this happened, what it did to their families, what it did to the community, how this originated in mosques.”
As tensions have built in recent weeks over the hearings, Mr. King has become as controversial as the hearing itself. Critics, pointing to his past as a supporter of the Irish Republican Army during its bloody campaign of attacking the British Army, say he himself was a backer of terrorism. (Mr. King was ultimately influential in using his ties to the I.R.A. to bring about peace in Northern Ireland.)
And some of his statements, like the assertion in a 2004 interview with Sean Hannity that “80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” have landed him in hot water. In a letter to Mr. King sent last month, the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights said it was “‘deeply troubled by the rhetoric” surrounding the hearings, and accused Mr. King of “perpetuating the dangerous myth” that mosques are breeding grounds for terror.
At least, unlike the McCarthy era, there is organized opposition to Congressman King's Islamophobia.
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"Opinion: Self-destructing GOP" by Michael A. Cohen, Politico 3/10/2011
Excerpt
If the goal of House Republicans is to ensure their party remains the overwhelming province of white voters, this week’s House Homeland Security Committee hearings on radicalization among American Muslims is an excellent place to start.
Chairman Peter King’s lurid accusations that younger Muslims are embracing Al Qaeda, as well as the New York Republican’s bogus charges that Muslims refuse to cooperate with law enforcement on terrorism cases and that 80 percent of U.S. mosques are controlled by radical imams appear likely to alienate more minority voters. It seems a surefire way to guarantee that Republicans lose the support of yet another minority group it once assiduously courted.
Indeed, the drop-off in support of Republicans among Muslims continues a pattern of failed outreach to minority populations and scapegoating of nonwhite groups that has become a depressing part of GOP politics in the past four decades.
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