The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is pressing forward with his public examination of Muslim extremism in America, pointing to his first, tense hearing on the subject as a step toward desensitizing a taboo topic and rooting out terrorists on U.S. soil.
“There’s an elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. We talked about it today,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), said after the four-hour, emotion-filled session March 10. King vowed that it was just the first in a series of sessions.
A number of Jewish groups expressed concern over the hearings.
“Homegrown Muslim extremists pose a real threat to the United States, but the issue is one that may be difficult to explore seriously in a hearing that has engendered an unfortunate atmosphere of blame and suspicion of the broader American Muslim community,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement. “We need to be careful not to single out an entire community for special scrutiny or suspicion.”
Local reaction came from Rita Semel, the executive vice chair of the San Francisco Interfaith Council. Semel, who did not attend the hearing, titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response,” issued a statement from her council that read, in part:
“By its very name this hearing seeks to isolate a particular faith community and stigmatize all Muslims as potential ‘homegrown’ terrorists. In the past the United States has singled out other religious and ethnic communities only to apologize years later.”
The statement called for a “stop [to] these un-American hearings.”
The Reform movement, J Street and the National Jewish Democratic Council also criticized the hearings for singling out Muslims.
But the American Jewish Committee and the Republican Jewish Coalition said that examining Muslim extremism is a proper issue for Congress.
Yehudit Barsky, director of AJC’s division on the Middle East and International Terrorism, submitted written testimony in which she listed recent planned attacks by Muslim extremists on U.S. Jewish targets. She also testified, noting that some Muslim organizations have raised “the specter of McCarthyism” in relation to the hearings.
“They and others have demanded that any discussion or investigation of this national security threat be broadened to include all extremists in all communities,” she said. “Logic and experience, however, dictate that any meaningful inquiry focus on particular organizations and extremists that currently pose a national security threat.”
Previous congressional hearings have more broadly addressed terrorism, noting that the most serious terrorist attacks on American soil have been carried out by right-wing extremists.
King suggested that Muslim leaders do not cooperate with authorities, that they coddle terrorist sympathizers and that the vast majority of clerics are radicalized. Yet he failed to invite to the hearings major Muslim American groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to defend themselves.
Experts have questioned King’s assertions, noting that Muslims have provided the tips that led to many of the arrests of putative terrorists in recent years.
The hearing opened with photos of the burning World Trade Center and the Pentagon on display. King did not release any new statistics on how many Muslims were helping root out terrorists or how many refused, nor did he invite federal law enforcement officials to testify.
Instead, the hearing opened with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, and then featured testimony from the families of two young men who blame the Islamic community for recruiting them to terrorism.
“This committee’s approach to this particular subject, I believe, is contrary to the best of American values and threatens our security — or could, potentially,” Ellison said.
Laurie Kellman of the Associated Press and Ron Kampeas of JTA contributed to this report.