Critics fear probe of U.S. Muslims will become witch hunt

WASHINGTON— A U.S. Republican lawmaker’s decision to hold high-profile congressional hearings this week on the “extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community” has stirred charges of McCarthyism and comparisons with the treatment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War.

Rep. Peter King, the head of the House homeland security committee, says he’ll go ahead with the hearings because the threat posed by homegrown Muslim terrorists “is too important to ignore in the name of political correctness.”

But the hearings will open Thursday amid protest from Democratic lawmakers, civil libertarians and American Muslim groups that contend Mr. King is on a witch hunt akin to Senator Joe McCarthy’s search for Communist sympathizers during the Cold War. Moreover, Muslim groups are furious with Mr. King’s contention their community is “not fully co-operating” with law enforcement officials investigating terror recruitment efforts.

In a letter to Mr. King on Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and 40 other groups said the hearings are based on a“deeply flawed theory” of radicalization that conflated religious practice with terror training.

“Treating an entire community as suspect because of the bad acts or intolerant statements of a few is imprudent and unfair, and in the past has only led to greater misunderstanding, injustice and discrimination,” the letter says.

Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat of Japanese-American descent, said the hearings remind him of the internment camp that his family was forced to live in following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

“Rep. King’s intent seems clear: to cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia,” Mr. Honda, who spent his childhood in a Colorado relocation camp for Japanese-Americans, said in a statement.

“By framing his hearings as an investigation of the American Muslim community, the implication is that we should be suspicious of our Muslim neighbours, co-workers or classmates solely on the basis of their religion.”

Mr. King, who says he has received threats since announcing the hearings in December, insists his aim is not to stigmatize an entire group.

He said he wants to investigate the extent to which terror groups overseas are recruiting U.S. Muslims“to engage in jihadist attacks against innocent Americans.”

The New York congressman has cited the 2009 Fort Hood shootings and last year’s failed Times Square bombing as clear evidence of the heightened risk posed by American Muslims driven to violence by radical teachings.

Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 in the Fort Hood attacks, was born in Virginia. Faisal Shahzad, who has been convicted of the Manhattan car bomb plot, was a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan.

Both were followers of American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been targeted for assassination by the U.S. government.

Democrats— including Rep. Bennie Thompson, the party’s ranking member on the homeland security committee — say the radicalization hearings should be expanded to include testimony on white supremacists and other extremist groups in the U.S.

But Mr. King has reminded Democrat critics that it was President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who last year said the one thing that “keeps me up at night” is the threat of homegrown terror attacks.

“I mean, Eric Holder is not saying he’s staying awake at night because of what’s coming from anti-abortion demonstrators or coming from environmental extremists or from neo-Nazis,” Mr. King told CNN. “It’s the radicalization right now in the Muslim community.”

The White House, for its part, has not raised any objections to King’s hearings.

“We welcome congressional interests in this issue,” said Jay Carney, Obama’s spokesman. “We think it’s an important issue. It’s one we’ve been working on for a long time.”

All the same, Mr. Obama dispatched his deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, to a northern Virginia mosque last weekend to reassure the Muslim community it is not being singled out.

“In the United States of America, we don’t practise guilt by association,” Mr. McDonough said.

Mr. King has sought to balance complaints about his hearings by inviting his critics to give their viewpoints. The list of witnesses include Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who in 2008 became the first Muslim-American elected to Congress.

Mr. Ellison has said holding the hearings will“vilify” American Muslims over the actions of a “very small minority” of radicalized Muslims.

The witness list also includes Melvin Bledsoe, whose son, 24-year-old Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, is accused of killing a U.S. soldier at a Little Rock, Arkansas army recruiting centre.

Muhammad is a Muslim convert who studied in Yemen and, after initially claiming he acted alone, recently said he is a member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

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