Muslim Baiting: Peter King's Dangerous Obsession

In the last month and half, the Muslim world has been re-imagined in Western minds. On our television screens, at least before the upheaval in Libya, we saw women on the streets of Cairo, peaceful demonstrations, dictators overthrown.

It was a different Islamic world than the one we'd been shown before, one that craves democracy, privileges peace; it was a counterpoint to Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," and it provided a recognition of shared values, shared hopes.

The world we saw is imperfect, to be sure. Women are struggling to be equal partners in that peaceful revolution. But it is a struggle that is taking place away, largely, from terror.

Some in the Republican Party didn't get the memo. Like his counterparts in France's Front National, Belgium's Vlaams Belang, Holland's Party for Freedom, and Austria's Freedom Party, New York Rep. Peter King sees threats of domestic extremism embodied by one group: Muslims. And that group has to account for itself in America, as if it were a recalcitrant child being made to write on a chalkboard, "I am a good citizen. I am a good citizen. I am a good citizen . . ."

Thanks to the Republican majority in the House, King now has the power to act out an obsession with radical Islam that was years in the making. This obsession places him outside the American political mainstream and fails to jibe with facts on the ground. It seems more like a flashback to the post-9/11 period, when Muslims were targeted for "looking Muslim" (and Sikhs for looking . . . different). It's an obsession that is particularly creaky, out-of-touch and dangerous right now, even as the Arab world morphs before our eyes and the time-worn image of the "Arab Street" changes.

On Thursday, King's Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community's Response."

Note that -- despite Tucson, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech and so many other examples -- the focus is not on radicalization in America. No. For the former IRA supporter King, radicalization holds a Koran. And he will use hand-picked Muslims to testify that Muslims are not doing enough to stop terror in their midst. (Though that's not all he'll hear: Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim and a Democrat, is among those scheduled to speak, and he's made it clear he will challenge King's premise.)

"That's where the danger is coming from," King told Fox News. "It's a small percentage. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding Americans. But the reality is that the threat is coming from within that community."

No one would argue that there is no risk of terror in America. The question is how do lawmakers best assess that risk, and act to address it. Does King's hearing help or hurt serious efforts to foil those who would plan or execute domestic terrorism?

It appears that King is ready to disregard an increasingly robust body of evidence that shows the best efforts toward frustrating extremism within the American Muslim community come from Muslim Americans themselves. What's more, a report published two weeks ago by Duke's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security showed that Muslim-American terrorism had dropped sharply from 2009 to 2010 (and, in real numbers, was negligible in the first place), and that the disruption of plots that did take place were largely thwarted with the aid of an eager-to-help Muslim-American community.

"Some of the greatest successes have been from Muslims helping -- aren't you telling those people their efforts are worthless?" says Bernard Hakyl, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, in response to King's stance. "And aren't you in fact endangering the United States by doing this? Aren't you bringing about the very thing you say you are trying to avoid?"

Agrees Hussein Rashid, a professor at Hofstra who blogs at HusseinRashid.com: "Most domestic terror does not come from the Muslim community. The equivalent would have made all Irish Catholics suspects in '80s, Jews in Communist era, blacks in rise of the Black Panthers, or that all Italians would be responsible for the mob. It is unacceptable.

"It shows that King is unaware of his constituency in New York. It shows a real lack of engagement with those constituencies and shows a real lack of awareness of what being in charge of Homeland Security actually means -- it means engaging on what unites us rather than [what's] dividing us. . . . Diverting law enforcement resources away from real threats to investigating our community, well, that opens holes in our safety net."

King has been called a McCarthyite. But this show-trial is more in line with a type of Islamophobia championed by right-wing groups in Europe -- a movement toward ugly synergy embodied last summer by the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy and that led some U.S. leaders to reach out to anti-immigrant, Muslim-fearing commentators from Europe, such as Holland's Geert Wilders. It is a movement that the Boston-based research group Political Research Associates said Tuesday has propelled a type of bias training. "Since September 11, 2001," PRA writes on its website, "the 'war on terror' has given rise to private companies that offer training by so-called 'experts' on Islam and terrorism. These experts label Islam as a terrorist religion, routinely branding Muslims as vengeful and duplicitous people who oppress Westerners."

Such talk sounds not terribly dissimilar from remarks made by King, who told Fox News in 2004 that "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists."

It is also holds remarkable similarity to the discourse of Europe's far right.

"You can't integrate or assimilate a whole community who sticks together, who has nothing to do with our life, our civilization! At least an important minority of them despises us," Filip Dewinter, the head of the Flemish political party Vlaams Belang, said to me a few years ago regarding Muslim immigrants.

King has said that he is trying to simply distill extremism down to component parts. He told the New York Times this week that to include other forms of extremism would "dilute" the focus of his committee's hearing. "That, to me, is political correctness at its worst. If we included these other violent events in the hearings, we'd be sending the false signal that we think there's a security-threat equivalency between al-Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or al-Qaeda and gun groups. There is none. . . . I'm not going to dilute the hearings by including other extremists."

Many are pushing back. Dozens of religious leaders and human rights groups have spoken out. On Wednesday a website -- www.whatunites.us -- was launched that "calls on Americans to aspire to common values. The campaign brings together Americans from all walks of life to push back against anti-Muslim rhetoric and make it unacceptable for public figures of any kind, but especially elected officials, to espouse anti-Muslim hate. The campaign calls on Americans to focus on what unites us and to call out rhetoric and actions that divide us. The campaign is built around the American values of freedom, truth, fairness, justice and diversity."

For King, such values seem to be relative.

But perhaps they are also part of a larger plot he is writing for himself, a fictional tale like his book "Vale of Tears," a Christian allegory about a life of suffering on Earth. Written in 2004, it is about a Long Island congressman who sets out to make the world safe for democracy by fighting radical Islam. Today, it seems Long Island Congressman King is confusing reality and his fiction.