Sounds like Republicans interested in a return to McCarthyism are about to get exactly what they want from the House Homeland Security Committee Republican Peter King intends to run:
Representative Peter T. King of New York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he was responding to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.
He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan man and a legal resident of the United States, who was arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway system. Mr. King said that Ahmad Wais Afzali, an imam in Queens who had been a police informant, had warned Mr. Zazi before his arrest that he was the target of a terror investigation.
Interesting take. Anecdotal evidence aside, the American Muslim community has played a substantial role in the foiling of domestic terrorism plots -- about a third of them overall. Remember the fight over the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero? We're about to see a lot of the characters from that fight in the news again -- not because of protests or what they're writing on the Internet but because they'll be testifying in Congress as "experts" on Islam and domestic radicalization.
The Times notes that King joined Democrats in their spasm of hysterical xenophobia during the Dubai Ports deal, and was an outspoken opponent of the Park51 project. But what it fails to note is that King demanded that the backers of the community center be investigated by the government for ties to terrorism, entirely without evidence, simply on the basis that they were building something he didn't want them to build in a place where he didn't want them to build it. I doubt he'll be more restrained during these hearings.
The comparison to the House Un-American Activities Committee isn't arbitrary. Many conservatives have embraced the notion that America is under attack by "stealth jihadists," that the American Muslim community only pretends to be moderate while secretly planning to turn the U.S. into a caliphate governed by Taliban-style Sharia law. That theory lends itself to the kind of paranoia, unsubstantiated accusations, guilt by association, and criminalization of nonviolent political advocacy that were the hallmark of the hysterical anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.
