US hearings into ‘rising threat’ from homegrown Muslims
His critics have branded him a “Joe McCarthy for the age of terror”. Republican Congressman Peter King is holding hearings into what he sees as the rising terror threat from American Muslims.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Peter King accused some Muslim leaders of not doing enough to help the police and FBI investigate terror plots – singling out those he said were “identifying one way or another with al-Qaeda“.
Democrats on the committee asked for the hearings to be widened to include other potential terror threats – like neo-Nazis, environmental extremists and right wing militias – but to no avail. The only Muslim in Congress – Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who’ll be giving evidence, has branded the whole exercise a “McCarthyite witch-hunt”. Others have dubbed it “Islamophobia – draped in the American flag”.
The concern among Muslim activists and human rights groups lies in identifying one community as the source of America’s terror threat – and the fear that they could simply end up being demonised and alienated.
Hundreds of people protested against the hearings in New York at the weekend, including Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, one of the key figures behind the proposed Islamic centre and mosque in downtown Manhattan that so inflamed tempers when it was proposed.
It’s not just the threat of bigotry that he’s worried about, though. “If Muslims think they’re under attack by their own members of Congress… this itself helps radicalise people. And we need to reverse that cycle” he said.
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The White House, while being careful not to denounce the hearings themselves, is clearly anxious to speak out against intolerance: on Sunday the deputy national security advisor Denis McDonugh told a crowd packed into a mosque in Virginia: ‘We must resolve that, in our determination to protect our nation, we will not stigmatise or demonise entire communities because of the actions of a few.
He went on, “In the United States of America, we dont practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with each of us.”
Let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with each of us. Denis McDonugh
The administration is now finalising its own plan to tackle violent extremism and prevent radical violence – but their plan is all about outreach – including meetings with local Muslim officials and wider engagement within communities.
So are these hearings a personal crusade (no pun intended) by Congressman King – or do they reflect a wider Republican view? King himself has a long history of inflamatory views.
In 2004 he told Sean Hannity that “no American muslim leaders are co-operating in the war on terror” and claimed that “80-85 per cent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” insisting “this is an enemy living among us”.
His claim that Muslims have failed to co-operate enough with the police and FBI has been called into question. The Washington Post cites the FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Attorney General Eric H Holder, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, who’ve each praised the Muslim American community for “playing an instrumental role in assisting law enforcement agencies”.
And there have been questions over the witnesses that King may call before his committee – many tacks – like Newt Gingrich, who likened it to Nazis trying to put up a sign next to Washington’s Holocaust Museum.
Peter Beinart, writing in The Daily Beast, points out that Georgia Republican Paul Broun complaned to Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano that he’d seen a man “of Arab or Middle Eastern appearance” going through airport security without special checks, warning “we’ve gotta profile these fellas”. While potential presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has described “the accommodation we’re making to one religion at the expense of others” as “very un-American”.
If I had made this about the Christian right or militia movements, I doubt there would have been this knee-jerk reaction. Peter King
According to King: “If I had made this about the Christian right or militia movements, I doubt there would have been this knee-jerk reaction. I’d like the media to accept that this can be a conversation without anyone being accused of being a bigot”. Except the fuss about the Manhattan Islamic centre led not just to vandalism and verbal threats – but, according to the Muslim Bar Association’s Asim Rehman, in New York Magazine – actual physical violence too.
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Will these hearings, he asks, convince others to do the wrong thing too? Another Democratic Congressman, California’s Michael Honda, casts aspersions on the entire exercise: “King’s intent seems clear: to cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia.”
Whatever Peter King’s intent – his Congressional hearings are already proving highly controversial, before they’ve even begun. The White House will have to work hard to prove that America’s long tradition of tolerance can triumph over a debate that’s anything but.
Felicity Spector is a chief sub-editor at Channel 4 News. Follow her on Twitter @felicityspector.