The Washington Post has a good piece today looking at Rep. Peter King's prior relationships with his Muslim constituents prior to 9/11 in the lead up to King's Muslim HUAC hearings. While King previously had a good relationship with Muslim leaders in his district, their reaction to 9/11 and their willingness to blame an Israeli conspiracy for the attacks led to a falling out that seems to have colored King's views of Muslims ever since.
This paragraph popped out at me:
But for some of King's Muslim constituents, his most hurtful words came in the form of his 2004 novel, "Vale of Tears." The story revolves around a fictional congressman who stumbles across a plan by terrorists -- who are associated with a Long Island mosque and work with al-Qaeda and remnants of the Irish Republican Army -- that could kill hundreds.
King dedicated the novel to "those who were murdered on September 11" and explained his purpose in the preface: "It describes how vulnerable we can become if we lower our guard -- for even the slightest moment -- and if we fail to recognize that our terrorist foes comprise a worldwide network with operatives active within our borders."
King was once the Irish Republican Army's biggest congressional supporter, calling it "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland." King was a prominent fundraiser for "Noraid" an analogue to the kind of Islamic charities that secretly funnel money to terrorists. Georgetown Law professor David Cole told Mother Jones that King's activities in support of the IRA would "without a doubt" constitute a violation of the material support for terrorism statute today.
King's love affair with the IRA ended shortly after 9/11 as well, because King said his former allies had adopted a "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" in response to American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it's still extraordinary that someone as actively supportive of the use of political violence in the past as King would be running these hearings.
His decision to take some kind of bizarre emotional revenge by slapping his former allies together in a novel with an implausible plot in which violent Islamic extremists somehow lose their distaste for "infidels" and the IRA suddenly decide they'd like to start targeting the United States is also really strange, but I find myself wishing King had stopped there.
