McCarthyism is alive and well in the 112th Congress, in the form of the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Pete King (R-NY) who is a raving Islamophobe, and has set a hearing for Thursday, March 10, entitled "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response".
Mr.King may well be looking forward to his little hearing tomorrow, but he is probably very unhappy with The New York Times today, since they took a peek at Rep. King’s resume, so to speak, and found it to be grounded in support for a terrorist group.
“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”
As Mr. King, a Republican, rose as a Long Island politician in the 1980s, benefiting from strong Irish-American support, the I.R.A. was carrying out a bloody campaign of bombing and sniping, targeting the British Army, Protestant paramilitaries and sometimes pubs and other civilian gathering spots. His statements, along with his close ties to key figures in the military and political wings of the I.R.A., drew the attention of British and American authorities.
A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an “obvious collaborator,” said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of “A Secret History of the I.R.A.” In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a “security risk,” Mr. Moloney said.
Think Progress on King’s hearing strategy:
On Thursday, Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-NY) will open his investigation into the American Muslim community. The hearings, ostensibly about America’s terrorist threats, are narrowly targeted at Muslims. King has refused to broaden the investigation into other well-documented terrorist groups, like the “Sovereign Citizen” movement. In fact, King has promoted his hearings in the media with inflammatory rhetoric, declaring there are “too many mosques” in the country and that Muslims aren’t American when it comes to war.
King said he originally planned to invite only Muslims to testify about the threat of American Muslim radicalism. To hear more about this strategy, we spoke to “radical Islamophobe” activist Brigitte Gabriel at the 2011 CPAC conference. Gabriel, profiled in the New York Times today, has pushed a campaign of excluding Muslims from public office, blocking the construction of mosques, and legislating bans on communities practicing Sharia. In February, Gabriel’s anti-Muslim group “ACT! For America” co-sponsored a hate rally captured on video by CAIR.
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