Excerpt:
Decapitation has a way of clearing one's head. My invitation to a beheading came from former Israeli officer and counter-terrorism expert Richard Horowitz, who thought that if I watched a video of one in the security of his library, I would understand what he already knew: just how ferociously we in the West are hated. In the video, a Muslim boy beheads a man. The murderer is 10.
I am a woman who practices medicine and Islam. Islam took me to Mecca and Hajj. Medicine took me to Riyadh and London. Each capital hosts communities espousing Islamist neo-orthodoxy. Both spawn violent jihadist ideologies. Listening to counter-terrorism experts and examining the ugly underbelly of contemporary radical Islamism has taught me what Muslims in Mecca, Riyadh, or London could not: the difference between Islam and Islamism.
Rep. Peter King (R) of New York's Senate hearings seek answers to these and other questions, while attacks of "Islamophobia" and "McCarthyism" threaten to suffocate this vital discourse. As a Muslim, watching Islamists at work lends me rare perspective. Mr. King's hearings offer the public this same perspective, just when it is needed most.