Andrew McCarthy defends Rep. Peter King's Muslim hearings, mostly because he thinks Islam is inherently bad ("What “radicalizes” Muslims is Islam") and so anything that paints Muslims broadly as dangerous is a good thing. In the course of offering the necessary rhetorical excuse that "not all Muslims" are bad, he brings up "taqiyya" again.
Moreover, while the Muslim community in the United States includes many patriotic Americans, it also includes Islamists who seek to undermine our country. The latter adhere to taqqiya, a principle that endorses misrepresentation when necessary to advance the Islamist cause. This principle's operation is not mitigated by putting these people under oath at hearings, because their fidelity is to sharia, not American law — if they think it will help to lie, they will lie.
Conservative fearmongers love saying the word "taqiyya," they believe it confers a sense of expertise in Islamic theology. But of course many people, not just Muslims, lie when "they think it will help to lie," regardless of the cause. So the concept is basically meaningless, except that in the absence of evidence that someone is actually lying, the evidence of dishonesty becomes the fact that the person is a Muslim, because Muslims are allowed to lie, their religion says so.
Anyway, McCarthy goes on to smear Rep. Keith Ellison for his appearance at King's last hearing, alleging that his account of Muslim first responder on 9/11, Mohammed Salman Hamdani, was "riddled with falsehoods." A perfect example of taqiyya, or something.
As Matt Shaffer recounted on the Corner, Ellison — a hard-Left Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives — gave the committee a weepy account of American bigotry against a Muslim American who died heroically trying to save lives on 9/11. Not surprisingly, Ellison’s story was riddled with falsehoods. To be sure, there is value in watching some of these characters dodge, dissemble, and demagogue. But they are a big part of the challenge we face, so it’s foolish to make them our window into the Muslim community.
Of course it was Shaffer's post that was obviously erroneous--to the point where Shaffer accused Ellison of lying not because media organizations didn't suggest the individual might have been connected to the attacks, but because he was lionized later, after being exonerated. Shaffer was too busy to do a more thorough Google search that would have turned up a number of other contemporaneous accounts from New York newspapers baselessly suggesting that Hamdani might have been involved with the attacks.
So McCarthy, in an effort to minimize anti-Muslim bigotry, accused someone else of espousing "falsehoods" even though the story Ellison told is well documented. Now McCarthy may just be guilty of confirmation bias here, but I suppose it's also possible that he thinks the cause of anti-Islamism is worth lying about since his broader point is true. What do we call that again?
