Over the weekend, Rep. Peter King undermined the own premise of his Muslim HUAC hearings when he admitted, after months of arguing otherwise, that the threat of domestic radicalization was posed by a "very small minority."
We now know who he's calling as witnesses as well, and there will be no members of law enforcement present to corroborate his claim that Muslims don't cooperate with law enforcement, while Democrats have called Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca to make the opposite point. But King will be calling two family members of individuals who were radicalized, Burhan Hassan's uncle Abdirizak Bihi, and Carlos Bledsoe's father Melvin Bledsoe. Hassan joined the Somalian extremist group al-Shabaab and died in Somalia, Bledsoe shot up a military recruiting center in 2009 killing one servicemember and wounding another.
Bledsoe however, was not radicalized in the U.S. Nick Sementelli points out that his family members indicate he was drawn to extremism after traveling to Yemen. The imam at the Nashville mosque Bledsoe attended has been vocal in his condemnations of terrorism and, the Memphis mosque where he originally converted happily cooperated with the FBI after the shooting. So not only is Bledsoe not an example of domestic radicalization, but the Muslims he associated with in the U.S. are an example of cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement.
Burhan Hassan was one of a number of young Somali-American Muslims in Minnesota who was recruited by al-Shabaab. This is a very real issue. Al-Shabaab has recruited more Americans than any other extremist organization (authorities say at least twenty) but this doesn't really lend itself to the broad, Islamophobic platitudes that have characterized King's approach to Islam. Al-Shabaab's success in recruitment is a very specific, localized phenomenon, one that we wouldn't understand any better if we just starting assuming all American Muslims are on the verge of joining an extremist group.
So while King has made a lot of outrageous statements about American Muslims not cooperating with law enforcement and harboring extremism, he hasn't called any witnesses who can confirm that with anything resembling authority, and the ones he has called undermine his original assertions.
