Here’s what the newsboys were saying in December:
The incoming chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security said Sunday that he will hold hearings on the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.”
In an op-ed piece in Newsday, Rep. Peter King said such hearings are critical because al-Qaida “is recruiting Muslims living legally in the United States -- homegrown terrorists who have managed to stay under the anti-terror radar screen.”
The Long Island Republican said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that the Muslim community “does not cooperate with law enforcement to anywhere near the extent that they should.”
“With al-Qaida trying to recruit from within their community it’s important that they cooperate,” King said.
A spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said he fears King’s hearings will become an anti-Muslim witch hunt.
“We’re concerned that it’ll become a new McCarthy-type hearing,” said the spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper.
Some McCarthy this chairman turned out to be. As time went on he would begin to seem more like just another Manchurian Candidate wound up and set going by the Muslim Brotherhood. That's because as time went on the furor from the Left increased (as usual, the Right was lulled by headlines). Here’s a good overview from News With Views, written a week or so later as the noise-to-reason ratio increased:
MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, who called communist Van Jones a “great patriot” during the “One Nation Working Together” rally, has now decided it is his job to protect Islamic terrorists from being investigated by Rep. Peter King, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. The ink was barely dry on a King op-ed calling for scrutiny into those networks when Schultz featured Muslim Democratic Rep Keith Ellison on his show, complaining in advance that the probe would be a “witch hunt.”
The choice of guests was no accident. Reporter Kevin Diaz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune notes that Ellison’s Minneapolis, Minnesota district “has been fertile recruitment ground for Al-Shabab insurgents in Somalia” who are under the influence of al Qaeda. So the witches apparently do exist.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism found that Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress who was just elected co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been financially supported by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who favor imposition of Islamic law on society.
[…]
One of those federal officials, Philip Mudd, associate executive assistant director of the National Security Branch of the FBI, said, “In Minneapolis, we believe there has been an active and deliberate attempt to recruit individuals--all of whom are young men, some only in their late teens--to travel to Somalia to fight or train on behalf of al-Shabaab.”
The hearings resulted in a report, “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Home Grown Terrorist Threat.”
A report into the Minneapolis problem by the cable channel HDNet described it as “a chilling threat to national security that has sparked one of the largest anti-terror investigations since 9/11.” It quoted FBI Special Agent Timothy Gossfeld as saying, “We have a principal, potential threat to national security right here on U.S. soil, actually, even within the state of Minnesota. So our director has already acknowledged the potential for individuals trained by al-Shabaab, under the influence of al-Qaeda, potentially being used to target the United States.”
Front Page gave some background on Rep. King. It was disturbing, to say the least. This was not the record I’d have expected from a ‘conservative’:
New York Rep. Peter King is under attack for his plan to hold hearings on the Muslim community’s lack of cooperation with the government to stop the rising threat of homegrown radicalization when he becomes chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. King’s investigation, though, is imperative, as even top Obama administration officials are warning of the frightening increase in acts of homegrown terrorism. King is being described as the real extremist for his past vocal support of the Irish Republican Army and is being accused of having an anti-Muslim bias.[…]
The true “baseless claims” are the ones made against King. He was an advocate of U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia on the side of Muslims, has taken Pakistan’s side over India’s in their fight over Kashmir, and had a long relationship with the Muslim community of Long Island.[my emphasis - D] His record contradicts the accusation that he has an anti-Muslim agenda. His warnings are based in fact and they are echoed by top Obama administration officials.
What this ‘record’ compiled by Ryan Mauro shows is a man who is comfortable with terrorism. The IRA? Pakistan? But Mauro sounds hopeful about the hearings. Even with those past peccadilloes, many on the Right appeared to think Rep. King was going to expose some of the problems regarding Muslim terrorism in the U.S.
Alas, it appears that Rep. King has lost his way in the echo chamber of Washington’s sound bites and prevarications …
Today, Robert Spencer laid out the sad story, saying that King is “doomed to failure”:
Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told Politico Tuesday that “he’s not planning to call as witnesses such Muslim community critics as the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer, who have large followings among conservatives but are viewed as antagonists by many Muslims.” Instead, King plans to call people with “the real life experience of coming from the Muslim community,” including Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), as well as ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer M. Zuhdi Jasser.
I suppose Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives King some cred, but she’s hardly an American. Jasser is questionable at best. However, in the unkindest cut of all, King invites that fox-in-the-henhouse, his fellow politician, Keith Ellison. This is a spineless move, the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the Invertebrate Class - i.e., the Republicans.
[You’ve heard a lot about the Political Class but that designation in reality belongs to Democrats alone. They’re tough, they know all the moves of in-fighting, and they’re focused on the goal: winning at all costs. Republicans, with rare exceptions (Allen West comes to mind), are members of the spineless Invertebrate Class. That’s why Obama can shove them around with impunity - and has done so repeatedly while they stand around asking meekly for crumbs from the White House table.]
In explaining the colossal fail which the Homeland Security Committee is about to bring off, Mr. Spencer quotes liberally from his co-author Pamela Geller’s recent screed concerning King’s royal mess:
Geller is absolutely right that these hearings are shaping up to be a waste, and worse than a waste. King is apparently rattled by the full-court press of Islamic victimhood rhetoric from Islamic supremacist spokesmen and pressure groups, and is allowing them to set his agenda, acquiescing in their Alinskyite marginalization of Steven Emerson, a peerless antijihad researcher, and other antijihadists who have nothing to apologize for or be embarrassed about in their work to expose and resist the advance of the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, but who are targeted in ongoing Islamic supremacist defamation campaigns designed to discredit and sideline them (including myself). He is at the same time calling fox-in-the-henhouse witnesses like Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison.
Synchronicity! I hadn’t read Mr. Spencer’s metaphor when I chose that description earlier in this post. Obviously, it fits - perhaps it’s the chicken feathers all over Ellison’s record?
I’ve been watching Ellison for the last four years and he does not inspire Americans who are looking for a robust defense against Islam within our own borders . By the way, in that linked post, written in 2007 when Ellison was about to assume office, the tone was supposed to be satirical, or perhaps high irony. I didn’t ever expect him to be a voice for oppressed Muslim women but I couldn’t help pointing them out, even as I knew he’d be dancing to the fiddlers of the Muslim Brotherhood. [Yes, I know the Salafist MB doesn't approve of music because
It’s obvious that Rep King is a moral coward. If any investigative hearings about Islam’s inroads into our country do not include Robert Spencer or Steve Emerson or Dr. Andy Bostom, or Steve Coughlin, then said hearings are a waste of tax-payer monies and Rep. King should be investigated himself.
This is a disgrace. These experts are not being called because they have publicly voiced the truth about Islam AND because their political convictions come from the Right - as Rep. King supposedly does. These experts on Islam can report with authority about the history and the strategies of this supremacist, utopian scheme, especially as it applies to America. However, these knowledgeable, professional experts will be ignored because the cowardly King is afraid of the Left. His fear far outweighs any interest he might have in the truth which Spencer, et al, could give him in great depth.
This farce will no doubt be carried on as though it were a genuine hearing. Meanwhile, the ‘phobes in the ghetto will be ignored, even though they tell the truth. Rep. King doesn’t give a fig about the ‘truth’; if you asked him he’d probably do a Pontius Pilate routine with a rhetorical question back at you. What King wants is face-time in the MSM. Obviously, he wants the approval of his keepers. He’ll have to work hard to get it.
Not even Memeorandum is carrying any references to this story. That gives you some idea about how little the Political Class or its commentators care about Islam, radical or otherwise, in this country. They want circuses and infotainment - pace the Cordoba Initiative, which provided both.
We are rotted through and through. This perverse, wasteful launching of the new 112th Congress via the Homeland Security Committee hearings is simply further proof that it will be business as usual no matter who is in the chair.
Below is a listing of the members of the current Homeland Security Committee:
| Majority | Minority | |
| Peter T. King, New York, Chairman | Bennie Thompson, Mississippi, Ranking Member | |
| Lamar S. Smith, Texas | Loretta Sanchez, California | |
| Dan Lungren, California | Jane Harman, California | |
| Mike D. Rogers, Alabama | Sheila Jackson-Lee, Texas | |
| Michael McCaul, Texas | Henry Cuellar, Texas | |
| Gus Bilirakis, Florida | Yvette Clarke, New York | |
| Paul Broun, Georgia | Laura Richardson, California | |
| Candice Miller, Michigan | Donna Christian-Christensen, | |
| Tim Walberg, Michigan | Virgin Islands | |
| Chip Cravaack, Minnesota | Danny K. Davis, Illinois | |
| Joe Walsh, Illinois | Brian Higgins, New York | |
| Pat Meehan, Pennsylvania | Jackie Speier, California | |
| Ben Quayle, Arizona | Cedric Richmond, Louisiana | |
| Scott Rigell, Virginia | Hansen Clarke, Michigan | |
| Billy Long, Missouri | William R. Keating, Massachusetts | |
| Jeff Duncan, South Carolina | ||
| Tom Marino, Pennsylvania | ||
| Blake Farenthold, Texas |
If your representative is listed, by all means use your citizen’s voice to bring what pressure you can to bear on these folks so that an honest and robustly truthful hearing can occur. Tell them to call on Spencer or Bostom or Emerson or Coughlin. If we do not speak up, then this travesty King has planned will be a sure thing. If we do not protest, then the Muslim Brotherhood will stay securely in the saddle.
They will ride Congress and all the branches of our bloated government all the way to the Ummah.
*[Thanks to Papa Whiskey for the "correx" re Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
Hat Tip: MM in New York
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