Thoughts occasioned by the hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee

The House Committee, chaired by Peter King, is holding a hearing today on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response”. The worldwide Muslim community is currently going through violent turmoil as events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Oman and Pakistan have shown. These countries had authoritarian governments, and huge numbers of young Muslims -- tired of poverty, poor economic growth and corruption  -- have moved forcefully to throw out the bums at the top. I sympathize with their aspirations, but wonder whether it will be possible to do so, if is the reformers are successful in changing governments whether those governments will be much better than those they replace. Even good government may not quickly solve the problems of poverty, lack of jobs, etc.

If you think of the spectrum of Muslim activity we have seen this year, the terrorist bombing seems to be very much a fringe activity of a very large demand for democratic reform, empowerment, and human rights.

I am old enough to remember the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator McCarthy and the red scare of the 1950s. I had to sign loyalty oaths to get and keep my job as a teaching assistant, working in undergraduate engineering labs. The boarding house where I took may meals for a year as a grad student was on the California :Attorney General's list of possible subversive organizations.

The United States has a long and dismal history of religious prejudice against native American religions, Jews, Catholics and Mormons to name a few cases. Churches were burned in the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. Let us not reenact the ugly past!

I would be more sanguine if the hearings were not the doing of Peter King. According to Wikipedia, he is thinking of running for office in the 2012 election. He was apparently a long term supporter of the IRA and had close ties to its terrorist fringe, (Apparently radicalism in the Irish Catholic community in Ireland was OK in the 80's?)

In 2000, he called then-presidential candidate George W. Bush a tool of "anti-Catholic bigoted forces," after Bush visited Bob Jones University in South Carolina, "an institution that is notorious in Ireland for awarding an honorary doctorate to Northern Ireland's tempestuous Protestant leader, Ian Paisley."
Quoted from the Wikipedia article

He got some publicity for comments about Michael Jackson after Jackson's death. He now seems to be going after the American Muslim community.

In 2004, King claimed in an interview with conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity that "no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror," and that "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. . . . I'll stand by that number of 85 percent. This is an enemy living amongst us."
Quoted in Wikipedia