Last week, a coalition of religious and human-rights groups asked Rep. Peter King to cancel his upcoming Homeland Security Committee hearings focusing exclusively on the radicalization of American Muslims, saying that "singling out a group of Americans for government scrutiny based on their faith is divisive and wrong."
A number of the claims on which King has staked the importance and disproportionate focus have proved to be false or exaggerated, and King's own behavior raises question about whether he's the appropriate person to address the issue.
King has said that "the fact is the Muslim community does not cooperate anywhere near to the extent that it should." I'm not sure what King means. A recent study from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that 40 percent of the terror attacks perpetrated by Islamic extremists or wannabes were foiled with the aid of Muslim Americans. That's a large number -- but that's also because, while Islamic extremism draws a lot of eyeballs, there just haven't been that many domestic attacks, period. The report also notes that "the number of Muslim-Americans engaged in terrorist acts with domestic targets declined from 18 in 2009 to 10 in 2010."
Despite King's disproportionate focus on terrorism perpetrated by Muslims or Muslim Americans, according to the Muslim Public Affairs Council's terrorism database, "there were 77 total plots by domestic non-Muslim perpetrators against the United States since 9/11/01. In comparison, there have been 41 total plots by domestic and international Muslim perpetrators since 9/11/01." With the obvious caveat that not every plot foiled is necessarily publicly known, there's no reason to believe that the domestic threat posed by Islamic extremism is one that needs to be focused on at the expense of addressing other potential threats.
King has often repeated the dubious statistic that "80% of mosques are radicalized" to justify his single-minded focus on Muslim Americans. But this statistic, while often quoted by conservatives, has no empirical basis. It was thrown out glibly by a single person, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, who based the more than decade-old claim not on scholarly research but on his own, anecdotal evidence.
King's past support for terrorist organizations like the Irish Republican Army raises questions about whether or not he's the appropriate person to perform this kind of oversight. While he's made as dramatic a split from them as his Muslim constituents, at one point in time, King was calling the IRA the "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland."
Aside from his willingness to embrace and repeat a dubious statistic about American Muslims being radicalized, King has said that there are "too many mosques in this country," and he suggested the organizers of the Islamic community center near ground zero might have ties to terrorism without evidence. Of the two people he's suggested as witnesses for the hearings, one has the same problem with repeating fabricated statistics as King, and the other has suggested amending the Constitution to give fewer rights to Muslims.
The government obviously has a national-security interest in making sure religious organizations aren't shielding, fueling, or aiding terrorism and extremism. But these hearings sound less like an attempt to shed light on an issue than a witch hunt, and King sounds less like an honest broker than someone with a particular ax to grind.
