As Peter King looked out over the circus he had convened yesterday he only had one thing on his mind: revenge. And this time it was personal.
“It was personal, he says, for everyone in his Long Island district, which was home to dozens of the police, firefighters and financial workers who died at the World Trade Center.” It was time for him to finally have revenge upon those that had so cruelly turned their shoulders on him all those years ago.
You see, King knows that Muslims are more likely to engage in terrorist activities because, well, they’re Muslim and the Islamic faith is inherently violent. Wait. That sounds an awful lot like racism and gross generalization. Nevertheless, King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee has seen it first hand; that’s right King has seen Muslim-Americans being Muslims, right here in America. King has actually spent a lot of time with the Muslim-American community so he should definitely know what they’re all about. King insists that “radicalization” (I think this means they’ve started skateboarding and listening to Suicidal Tendencies) in fucking rampant in Muslim-American communities, so much so that it’s necessary to hold hearings about it. Obviously these hearings are complete bullshit and really serve to either 1) ease the paranoia of King and similarly minded political friends or 2) maintain the discourse of scary Muslim terrorists maybe working at your local deli, plotting to put a stick of dynamite in your corn beef and rye. Actually, it’s probably a bit of both, wouldn’t you say? And to think King accused his detractors of being hysterical.
You see, King’s hearings smack all too much of political pandering. Back in January people gathered at the Long Island Islamic Center to discuss the upcoming hearings and what could be done to stop them. However, for this mosque the issue was particularly upsetting. “He used to come to our weddings. He ate dinner in our homes,” the mosque’s chairman, Habeeb Ahmed, said of King, the man whom is supposed to represent them in congress. No member of the Islamic Center in Long Island has ever been accused of terrorism and King has had long ties with the community; yet King has now turned on people he once considered friends, calling the Long Island Islamic Center a “hotbed” of radical Islam and accusing its leaders of being Islamic extremists.
It’s hard to guess what King’s motivation for conducting these hearings is (one can assume they’re partly political, King sees the way the country is swinging and wants to be able to say he was on the front-lines against radical Islam, in a district that’s 90% white alienating a religious minority might actually improve you electoral standings), although he had this to say yesterday as he opened the hearings: “Al-Qaeda is actively targeting the American Muslim community for recruitment. Today’s hearing will address this dangerous trend.” King has also maintained time and time again that Muslim communities are not doing enough to stop radicalization within their communities. This is ostensibly the real reason for the hearings being held: King believes that not only must all Muslims be held accountable for the acts of fringe groups that represent an extremely small portion of the actual Muslim population but that they must meet his standards of what constitutes appropriate measures to prevent terrorist acts from happening.
King’s split with his Muslim constituents began immediately after 9/11; when King first became congressman he would deliver speeches at the Islamic Center often and held book signings in the prayer hall. He took in Muslim interns and was one of the few Republicans who supported U.S. intervention in the 1990s to help Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. In return King had received generous outpourings of support from the Muslim community in his district, including significant financial contributions. In the days following 9/11 Americans were confused and bewildered; no one knew what to believe or discredit as false and there was vast amounts of conspiracy theories and conjecture being thrown around. It was in the climate of confusion that one of the Islamic Center’s directors, Ghazi Khankan, made this comment:
“Who really benefits from such a horrible tragedy that is blamed on Muslims
and Arabs? Definitely Muslims and Arabs do not benefit. It must be the enemy
of Muslims and Arabs. An independent investigation must take place.”
This seems like a perfectly reasonable statement to have made at the time and was probably in response to a direct question regarding who could possibly benefit from committing such an atrocity. Personally, if my religion (I don’t have one, but if I did) was being blamed left and right my first reaction would probably also be one of denial; who wants to think their religious brethren could be capable of such a thing? However, the failure to immediately react without thinking whatsoever infuriated King who claimed they were turning their back on America at its time of greatest need, “they were trying to look the other way while friends of mine were being murdered.” So it would seem that these hearings are the culmination of the grudge and resentment that King began to hold deep within his soul when his friends failed to rabidly demand vengeance for the death of 3000 Americans. He was upset that they didn’t mourn as hard as he did, didn’t want to exact vengeance on the perpetrators with every fiber of their being as King did.
“You have to understand the confusion and shock at the time,” continued Khankan, “tapes of Osama bin Laden had just been released in which he praised but was not yet openly taking responsibility for the attacks. Many at the mosque still remembered that Muslims had been immediately and falsely blamed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.” See, the unfortunate truth is that not every American does feel as strongly about 9/11 as others might. America has an enormous and diverse population with a regrettable history of systemic discrimination against racial and religious minorities. I’m sure most Muslims fervently denounce the 9/11 attacks (King actually claimed yesterday during the hearings that 15% of American Muslims believe suicide bombings are justified, which in itself is a completely negligible percentage but a bit of digging reveals that the poll he was referring to states this: It is 12% with 5% saying it is “rarely justified,” 7% saying “sometimes,” and 1% saying it is “justified.” This adds up to 13 percent) but can we blame them for not all rallying around the flag as America geared up to launch a war into the heart of their religious community? Can we blame Muslims for being wary of rabid, nationalist Islamophobia given the deep history of suspicion that Khankan’s above quotation speaks to?
“My district, I think it is a good barometer. Nobody in my district didn’t know somebody who was killed on Sept. 11. It is still very personal.” Look, Mr. King, I’m sorry your friends died.
I’m sorry that you were upset by your friends too, Mr. King, I really am. I’m sorry that their denouncement of 9/11 (which the Islamic Center did time and again as more information came to light) was not passionate enough or American enough for you. I’m sorry but you should be ashamed of yourself. You are a grown man and because you cannot control your emotions you have brought an invasive and arbitrary interrogation to bear on your own constituents from the very highest level of government. These are people that supported you, they gave you money, they fucking elected you to be their congressional representative and you’ve now sold them down the river for cheap political gain. You’re personal grudges shouldn’t be resolved through the congressional harassment of an entire religious group, Mr. King.
