In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

New York politician opens hearing on Muslims

Jill

Well, Peter King will definitely be getting his name in the history books in the chapter on post-9/11 racism and fear-mongering. I’d like to think we learned something from McCarthyism and Japanese internment and other uglier-than-even-usual periods in our history, but I guess not. (Surprising? No. Disgusting? Yes). It’s appalling that a United States congressman can organize hearings to discuss the dangers posed by our Muslim neighbors, but point out that maybe far-right folks like Peter King and Tea Party members across America are racist and ignorant, and you get fired.

In reality, terrorist plots by far-right organizations in the United States outnumber those by Muslims. But I guess that’s different.

7 thoughts on New York politician opens hearing on Muslims

  2. I’m from across the river in St. Paul, MN. Ellison is one of the few in Congress that actually takes courageous risks in favor of a more just nation. I really wish there were many more like him; maybe we’d be in a different place.

  3. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/politics/09king.html

    “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”

    …

    A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an “obvious collaborator,” said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of “A Secret History of the I.R.A.” In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a “security risk,” Mr. Moloney said.

    …

    But as Mr. King, 66, prepares to preside Thursday as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee at the first of a series of hearings on Muslim radicalization, his pro-I.R.A. past gives his many critics an obvious opening. The congressman’s assertions that 85 percent of leaders of American mosques hold extremist views and that Muslims do not cooperate with law enforcement have alarmed Muslim groups, some counterterrorism experts and even a few former allies in Irish-American causes.”

  4. How can it be worse to call someone a racist in a setting you assume is private, than to BE ONE IN PUBLIC.

    I hate this. I hate hate hate this. How inflated is the martyr complex of the far right? I know he had resigned for another opportunity anyway, but do you think there would be the uproar over Ron’s statements, do you think he’d be ‘fired’, if we weren’t fighting over funding of NPR? If Juan hadn’t just been fired for being a racist piece of shit?

    I hate the things done in the name of being “fair”. When you can’t call out a racist without being ‘biased’. When the local news asks the opinion of a far-right conservative wingnut on a piece about minority rights so as not to appear biased. I hate it.

  6. Link fail!
    Apparently I do not know how to write HTML, but the link still goes to the TPM article: “Peter King Hearing Focuses On Whether Peter King Hearing Was A Good Idea”

  7. I cannot express how much this amazes me. This genius supports the IRA, an organisation which blew up my aunt’s car when she refused to donate money for petrol bombs (and she was Catholic). He is the one with actual, for real links to terrorism.

    If any group should be investigated, it should probably be “comfortable Americans overly invested in and mistakenly self-identifying with other countries’ causes which they think are exotic and/or cool.”

Comments are currently closed.