I think if the new Congress holds hearings on the ‘Radicalization’ Of American Muslims then they also need to include the radicalization of so-called Patriots like Jim David Adkisson, Byron Williams, Scott Roeder, and Richard Poplawski among others.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is planning to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims when he takes over the chair of the Homeland Security Committee next year, the New York Times reports.
King, who denies being anti-Muslim, has nonetheless repeatedly cast suspicion on American Muslims as a whole since the 2001 terrorist attacks. He has helped mainstream the idea that 80 percent of mosques in America are led by radical clerics. The statistic has been cited over and over by those who believe American Muslims are raging a “stealth jihad.” He has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, saying Holder isn’t sufficiently aware that “our enemy today is radical Islam.”
House GOP To Hold Hearings On ‘Radicalization’ Of American Muslims
I think we shouldn’t limit the hearings just to Muslim extremists but we should include all home grown radicals who promote or act out violence to further their causes. As Paul Krugman wrote in 2009:
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.
