King Witch Hunter

By AM Wednesday, March 16, 2011

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I wonder, will you also call Jalat Hamdani, whose son Mohammad Salman Hamdani was an emergency medical technician (EMT) who died in the World Trade Centre on 9/11? Will the thousands of Muslims that serve in our military also testify? Will you ask them to defend their loyalty to this country? When would you like to schedule their testimonies: before, or after, the leg amputations resulting from IEDs that have injured many of them during their tours of duty? - Seema Jilani

The US has done little over the decades to diminish its reputation as home to reactionary ideas. Beyond dispute, many outstanding progressive thinkers exist in America, but a culture that allowed its president to openly endorse torture, in the process reversing one of the key tenets of modern civilisation, reveals the predominance of a mindset that is heavily tipped against the progressive. Conservative ideas no matter how deranged - as in Philip Johnson and Intelligent Design or Lawrence Mead and Workfare - have a purchase in US society like few other countries in the West. Beaming out from deep within American society there is a projection of conservative religious Neanderthals coupled to conservative political troglodytes. Between them they hate all and sundry not as revanchist, reactionary or retarded as themselves. Fertile ground for persecutionist zeal.

Against such a backdrop there is nothing startling that an anti-Muslim witch hunt which parallels the right wing McCarthy terror of the 1950s should be officially sanctioned under the title of ‘Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response’. What might be a surprise to some is that Peter King is in its avant garde.

King, a Long Island Republican Party Congressman, as we recall, is a long time associate of the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Despite a history - which he unsuccessfully tries to cloud in secrecy - steeped in the type of political violence King professes to abhor and promises to eradicate, Adams these days works at recasting himself in a radically different role. He has revised his past so as to portray himself as a human rights activist. Yet as Brian Rowan wrote recently ‘for all Adams' denials of IRA membership, he was part of the war before he was part of the peace.’ Now the commitment of Adams to human rights might be subject to the same ridicule as his disavowal of an IRA past if, on the international stage, he fails to move against King’s persecution of US Muslims which echoes the treatment meted out to the Irish community in Britain during the dark days of the 1970s. The guiding legal ethic then was innocent until proven Irish.

Ironically, for all his pontificating against violence, the case has been made that without the IRA wind in his sails King’s political career might never have left the port of obscurity. King told Ed Moloney in 2005 that ‘Gerry Adams made me respectable’. In a sense Adams, albeit unintentionally, created the bigot than now stalks US Muslims.

The kingdom of good King Peter is the House Homeland Security Committee of which he is the chairperson. Last week this committee set in motion congressional hearings on US Muslims in a professed bid to root out home-grown terrorism.

At the heart of the Committee’s case is that US Muslims are ‘uncooperative with authorities.’ Although as Seema Jilani points out in her Guardian piece:

the new study by the Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security… found that tips from Muslim Americans provided information that helped authorities thwart terrorist plots in 48 of 120 cases.

Quoting from the same report Jilani said ‘Muslim Americans have been so concerned about extremists in their midst that they have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.’ In this she finds support from C. Dixon Osburn of The Law and Security Program of Human Rights First who refutes the non-cooperation with the police line. It also challenges a further charge by King that 80% of religious leaders in mosques are radicalized. Osburn points out that the police and FBI disagree. Likewise the Los Angeles Times reported that ‘research by two North Carolina universities shows Muslims have been the top source of tips that have thwarted terrorism plots in the U.S.’

Facts, pesky things, they just can’t be allowed to impede a good old witch hunt where the loons are set loose to hunt whomever is labelled the outsider.

King has for a long time ranted against Muslims in the US. He was therefore a hostile witness long before he took his seat at the congressional hearings. He believes there are too many Mosques in the US. There probably are but then atheists like myself are prone to think that way. But at least we also think there are too many churches, chapels, synagogues, and whatever other type of temple people of faith worship in. King targets the Mosque alone. He won’t dare tell us there are too many synagogues. The Jewish Lobby has the power to roast him over the Holocaust spit were he to venture down that road.

Seema Jilani who delivered a blistering critique of King in the Guardian is a US Muslim. She is far removed from any image we may have of a theocrat intent on pressing home domination theology, hanging gays, stoning adulteses or threatening to behead cartoonists.

Radical Islam is, indeed, a threat – mostly to us Muslims, but it will not be conquered by your humiliating McCarthy-esque public defamations … The biggest threat to this nation is not radical Islam; it is you, hurling the malignancy of prejudice even deeper into the recesses of the American psyche, for your own gratuitous political gain … Let us call this what it is: bigotry draped in the American flag – nothing more than a fear-mongering attempt, drenched in political theatrics, laced with reactionary hatred, and deceptively packaged in an incredulous label of national security. Same as it ever was.

Bigotry draped in the English flag is a phenomenon the Irish have experience of. This morning Martin McGuinness was scheduled to breakfast with King. Let’s see if memory will prevail over forgetting and those who were the making of Peter King will seek to be his breaking.