Yesterday during the House Homeland Security hearings, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter specifically rebuked the premise of Rep. Peter King's Muslim HUAC hearings, the idea that American Muslims have been resistant to cooperating with law enforcement:
“Many of our tips to uncover active terrorist plots here in the United States have come from the Muslim community, so we have to make quite clear that communities are part of the solution and not part of the problem and we do that through using a variety of tools” said Leiter.
Leiter added that the proportion of American Muslims who are involved in extremism is “absolutely tiny.”
The number is tiny, but it's amplified by the kind of hysterical emotional overreactions terrorism still manages to provoke. Conservatives, King in particular, have played a large role in magnifying the impact of terror attacks for the purpose of inflicting damage on the administration.
In the past couple of weeks, we've learned that the statistic King often cites in support of his theories of radicalization is fabricated, that tips from the Muslim community have helped law enforcement in 40 percent of foiled terrorism plots, that domestic terrorism has gone down rather than up in the past year, and that King won't be calling any of the law enforcement officials he cites as the source for his unsubstantiated claim that Muslims don't cooperate with the authorities in terrorism cases.
Beyond King's obvious personal hostility towards Muslims, King's reasons for continuing with these hearings may involve some serious delusions of grandeur. As Michelle Goldberg writes, King's novel, Vale of Tears, doesn't just imagine a terrorism plot involving Islamic extremists and the IRA, a group he used to support. It also involves the protagonist, Sean Cross, whom Goldberg notes, King wrote as "a stand-in for himself."
Citing statistics and the testimony of law-enforcement and counterterrorism experts is one thing. But what effect can empirical evidence possibly have in an argument with someone who is literally acting out their adolescent fantasy as an action hero?
