‘Katrina/Rita FEMA Trailers: Are They Safe or Environmental Time Bombs?” “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and the Federal Workforce.” “Online Privacy, Social Networking, and Crime Victimization.” “The State of U.S. Coins and Currency.” “Diversity and the Department of Homeland Security: Continuing Challenges and New Opportunities.” “Civil Rights Services and Diversity Initiatives in the Coast Guard.” “Protecting Animal and Public Health: Homeland Security and the Federal Veterinarian Workforce.” “The Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing Enforcement Act of 2009.” “Tribal Police Recruitment, Hiring, Training, and Retention at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” “Organized Retail Crime.”
These are some of the topics about which the sundry homeland-security committees and subcommittees of the Democrat-controlled 111th Congress saw fit to hold hearings. The list drastically underrepresents the number of panels concerned with post-Katrina self-flagellation and the ever-impending influenza epidemic, obsessions that suggest DHS’s top security priorities are protecting citizens from family orthomyxoviridae and low-pressure systems of uncommon size. And those hearings in the 111th that did focus on “man-caused disasters” were concerned primarily with overreacting to the Deepwater Horizon spill and the missing the point of the fizzled Christmas Day attack (grope-a-dope, anyone?).
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Against this backdrop, the scandal is not that House Committee on Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R., N.Y.) will tomorrow hold hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.” The scandal is that they have been so long in coming.
The Department of Homeland Security was created in direct response to an act of Islamic terror, an act perpetrated by radical Muslims who lived and worked, planned and plotted inside the United States. Post-9/11, the threat of homegrown jihad is as great or greater. Just yesterday, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a Colorado mother who had converted to Islam, married a suspected Algerian terrorist, and moved with him to Ireland to plot attacks in Europe, pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge. She had previously been in contact with Colleen LaRose — aka Jihad Jane — a Pennsylvania woman who herself pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in the name of Islam. As we write, Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major of Palestinian descent, who was radicalized in the same Virginia mosque that nourished a number of the 9/11 hijackers and their American-born spiritual leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, sits in jail for the religiously motivated slaughter of 13 at Ft. Hood. He joins Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, who will spend the rest of his life in prison after a botched attempt to blow up Times Square for the favor of Allah. Then there are Bryant Neal Vinas, Sharif Mobley, John Walker Lindh, and “the D.C. Five,” all American-born converts to radical Islam arrested in the course of waging jihad against the United States.
These aren’t mere anecdotes. They are constitutive of the brute fact that homegrown terror is an overwhelmingly Islamic phenomenon. And yet a search of the Homeland Security hearings in the 111th yields not one mention of Islamism or jihad. So the cries of religious persecution from groups like CAIR and their allies on the left badly miss the point: It isn’t that we have cast a discriminatory eye toward Islam, but that excessive concern with the pieties of multicultural relativism has prevented us from being sufficiently critical of Islamism. A problem cannot be dealt with that is not first faced foursquarely, and, to appropriate a phrase, we have for too long been a nation of cowards when it comes to addressing jihadist radicalism between our shores. Representative King’s hearings make an honest first effort to do that.
Among the witnesses expected to appear at the hearing is Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, head of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, whom we expect to provide an overview of the threat of not only violent but also cultural jihad being waged by Islamists inside the United States. Witnesses Melvin Bledsoe and Abdirizak Bihi will share their firsthand knowledge of this threat. Bihi’s nephew, Burhan Hassan, was radicalized in a Minneapolis mosque and in 2008, at the age of 17, disappeared to Somalia, where he died, apparently fighting for the Islamist group al-Shaheeb. Mr. Bledsoe’s son, Carlos, converted to Islam in college after traveling to Yemen and went by the name Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad when he shot two army recruiters in Little Rock in 2009, killing one. We expect both men’s testimony to be both heart-rending and sobering.
There will of course be some dead weight among the witnesses: We doubt that Reps. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) and John Dingell (D., Mich.) will add much to the proceedings, besides defending their many peaceful Muslim constituents from an attack no one is contemplating. And we wish King had called the likes of Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and an indispensable voice on Islamism in America. But it is our understanding that this will be only the first of several hearings on the subject. So there may, at long last, be time to address this long-neglected topic.
Radical Islam is no worse than the other extreme religions we have here, like those umm....er...Amish and Quakers... That's right, what about them Mr. King?
At any time is history has any nation, in fact an entire civilization, become so dominated by the protocols of a pseudo-faith such as cultural diversity that it will accept it's own decline rather that to violate those protocols?
Many good people who are so indoctrinated with "cultural diversity" that to even mention Islam, Muslim or Jihad brings a Pavlovian response of "religon of peace" or "a few extremists". But if you say Christianity those very same people will recount in detail events of a 1000 years ago, or today's headlines of pedophiles in cloth, as proof of the corrupting nature of all religions.
Yet weekly headlines report events that highlight the ongoing violent nature of Islam are immediately dismissed as acts of deranged individuals. History reveals that Islam has been violent, aggressively violent, since it's inception and has been at war both internally and externally almost continuously ever since.
But to even broach the subject or Islamic violence and it's ongoing threat to public safety will inspire howls of "cultural persecution" before a gavel has fallen or a word spoken. And any who dare to ask such questions such as how to identify homegrown Islamic terrorists or are some mosques recruiting and indoctrinating terror recruits, are by default bigots, racists, Islamophobics and nazi's.
I remain stunned by the mindset that refuses to even see the mounting evidence much less talk about it.
Pretending that radical Islam is not a growing problem in this country will not make the problem go away...or make us suffer. Kudos to Representative King for taking an action which may result in us becoming safer and in less danger from homegrown man-caused disasters.
Agree, these hearings are long overdue. How many lives have been lost because these hearings could have preceipated action in that community to report those with views considered alien by those who want to do good. The Ft. Hood massacre comes to mind immediately. By delaying, it sent the wrong message.
Know your enemy....why is that hard?
we are not in denial....we are swept up in a plot to destroy this country.
this is not willful ignorance.
and yes, many of us remember the HUAC. your point is?
Pardon my cynicism, but I feel that it is genuine fear of Islamic extremism and not so much indoctrination in "cultural diversity" that causes many, particularly those in the American Islamic community, to remain silent when they should be speaking loudly.
The good news is that thanks to Peter King, it appears that we Americans who do not have time to follow this issue every day are finally going to hear from some genuine voices of Islamic moderation. I have been waiting for ten years to hear such voices loudly and clearly, and was beginning to fear they were few and far between.
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
"The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
"A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
"No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."
-Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899]).
This quote from Keith Ellison is too good not to share talking about the upcoming hearings on Islamic radicalization. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Its a bad idea to single out a religious minority group for an investigative hearing on violent radicalisation.
"I think it would be a problem to say we are going to have an investigation congressional hearing on Irish people who drink too much, or black people who sell drugs, or Jewish people who are engaged in financial crimes, or white people who commit bias crimes. Clearly this is singling out a particular group."
Anyone old enough to remember HUAC?
--You mean the committee dedicated to exposing traitors who were plotting with a conspiracy to create a Stalinist dictatorship in the US. Traitors who were willfully blind to the fact that the government they wished to create was responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century and the systematic mass murders of tens of millions of people? That HUAC?
--The committee that discovered high level traitors within the US that were plotting with foreign governments to undermine the US government foreign policy?
This important study draws deeply on HUAC hearings. It's a great indication of what congressional hearings can be used for (there's a substantial HUAC appendix), and how they can be viewed decades down the road. It's a great read, and I recommend it to all.
Radical Islam is a cancer that will destroy our freedom and in particular, the freedom of women. It demands submission from all, and calls upon believers to conquer the world for Allah.
Radical Muslims have declared war on us, have murdered us in the thousands, and will keep attacking until we submit or until they are defeated. But instead of fighting back hard, we are walking around like idiots afraid to criticize this destructive ideology and risk being considered insensitive or bigoted. It is time to replace the insanity of political correctness with some basic self-respect and common sense.
The ironic thing is that the chair of the hearings - Peter King - himself is a supporter of terrorism. Of course, King's terrorists are Irish Catholics so we can just look the other way.
Anyone who can't see the logic in holding these hearings and exposing the very-real (oh yes my precious hippy love-children. It's real) threat that islamists hold for the West is either in a serious state of denial, or they are seriously hoping that being "nice" to the enemy will spare them death at enemy hands.
It is way past time to grow up and get serious about this problem and that starts with admitting a problem exists. The enemy has no qualms in telling us exactly what their plans are, yet how do western liberals react? With thundering silence.
Elitist contemplation and pandering stupidity has no effect on these people. Islam has declared war on the West. Either accept that and deal with it or get fitted for a prayer rug.
I'm waiting any day now for National Review to call for a full investigation of the radicalized pro-life movement. I'm sure many would like to know if the evangelical/catholic community is fully coopertive with law-enforcement agencies when it comes to reporting on potential radicals. Clearly failure to do that would be a mark of cultural Jihad against innocent Americans and a threat to our constitutionally-guarantteed freedoms.
"Radical Islam" is a redundant term. And until this is grasped in its entirety, no amount of hearings are really going to accomplish that much. We're still ignoring the elephant in the room.
