Speaking of officially-sanctioned Islamophobia, GOP Rep. Peter King is having a hard time finding Muslim Americans, or any experts at all, to testify in his planned hearings about the “radicalization” of American Muslims. According to the American Prospect’s Adam Serwer, the one witness that King has managed to nail down for the hearings—which are scheduled to start next week—is a man on the advisory board of a group that seeks to “educate” law enforcement officers in the field of stereotyping Muslims. Beyond that, King hasn’t had much luck finding Muslim Americans to jump on his anti-Islam bandwagon:
Now, King has already removed two witnesses from his hearings for being controversial. The first, AEI Scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has suggested amending the U.S. Constitution to give fewer rights to Muslims. The other, Walid Phares, (who is also on the Clarion Fund advisory board) is a Lebanese Christian who was removed after CAIR accused him of ties to Christian militias implicated in civilian massacres in Lebanon.
These witnesses may have been “controversial,” but I suspect part of the reason they were removed is that King may have not realized when he chose them that neither of them identify as Muslims. After the Investigative Project’s Steve Emerson wrote King an angry letter saying he felt rejected by King’s decision not to call him as a witness, King emphasized that “the lead witnesses would be Muslims who believe their community is being radicalized.” Hirsi Ali was raised a Muslim but is an atheist, and Phares is a Christian.
As it stands, King has one witness, tied to the industry of Islamophobic distortion that is undermining the war of ideas against al-Qaeda by relaying misinformation to law enforcement. There just isn’t a very deep bench of Muslims willing to testify before Congress that most Muslims are enemies of the state.
As PFAW’s Michael Keegan wrote last month, the problem with King’s proposed hearings is that they seem to be aimed not at dealing with the facts about domestic terrorism, but at further exploring falsehoods and misinformation that have lead to widespread resentment of American Muslims:
Rep. King, in his highly public hearings, intends to explore the “radicalization” of American Muslims and what he sees as a lack of cooperation between Muslim communities and law enforcement. Before he starts, King should look at what the experts say. The nation’s top law enforcement official, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, recently said that “the cooperation of Muslim and Arab-American communities has been absolutely essential in identifying, and preventing, terrorist threats.”
The actions of a handful of violent extremists don’t represent the beliefs of an entire faith community. In fact, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, in earlier testimony before Rep. King and the Homeland Security Committee, said that the prevalence of violent extremists in American Muslim communities was “tiny…a minute percentage of the [U.S. Muslim] population.”
Local law enforcement officials agree. This month, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who oversees one of the largest law enforcement operations in the country, in one of the nation’s largest American Muslim population centers, said he hadn’t seen any evidence of the lack of cooperation that King claims exists: “Muslim Americans in the county of Los Angeles have been overwhelmingly astounded by terrorist attacks–like everyone else–and overwhelmingly concerned about a non-repeat performance of that kind, and are willing to get involved and help.”
It’s no wonder that King has been forced to rely on extremists, not experts, to argue his case.