Peter King: Doomed to Failure

Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told Politico Tuesday that “he’s not planning to call as witnesses such Muslim community critics as the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer, who have large followings among conservatives but are viewed as antagonists by many Muslims.” Instead, King plans to call people with “the real life experience of coming from the Muslim community,” including Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), as well as ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer M. Zuhdi Jasser.

In “King Abdicates” in The American Thinker Thursday, Pamela Geller declared that all this indicated that King’s hearings would be a “show trial.” Emerson, she pointed out, “knows who all the players are and what groups and cells they are affiliated with. He knows who everyone is and what he’s doing. For King to acquiesce in his marginalization is almost criminal.” And as for Ellison, Geller noted that he is “infamous for his pro-Hamas rallies and his pilgrimage to the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, paid for by the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Nor are King’s other witnesses much better. Geller further noted:

Read it all. Geller is absolutely right that these hearings are shaping up to be a waste, and worse than a waste. King is apparently rattled by the full-court press of Islamic victimhood rhetoric from Islamic supremacist spokesmen and pressure groups, and is allowing them to set his agenda, acquiescing in their Alinskyite marginalization of Steven Emerson, a peerless antijihad researcher, and other antijihadists who have nothing to apologize for or be embarrassed about in their work to expose and resist the advance of the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, but who are targeted in ongoing Islamic supremacist defamation campaigns designed to discredit and sideline them (including myself). He is at the same time calling fox-in-the-henhouse witnesses like Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison.

What happened to King? In October, he said that “it’s not just people who are involved with the terrorists and extremists, it is people who are in mainstream Islam, leaders of mosques, leaders of Muslim organizations who do not come forward and denounce, officially denounce, officially cooperate with the police against those extremists and terrorists. So, it goes beyond the terrorists and the extremists and also includes those in what others call mainstream Muslim leadership.” And again in December, he said: “When I meet with law enforcement, they are constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders.” And indeed, as Emerson’s Investigative Project demonstrated, Islamic supremacist group MPAC’s claim that Muslims broke up one-third of jihad terror plots is based on flawed and selective use of data.

Now King, belying his earlier statements about the non-cooperation of Muslim authorities in the U.S., says that in his hearings he is going to go to those selfsame authorities:

King in December said he was willing to be defamed as a “bigot” if that’s what it took to expose jihadist sentiments and activity in the Muslim community in the U.S. Ellison apparently took him up on that, calling him a bigot and saying: “I’m willing to engage with Congressman King and say, ‘Look, you want to talk about these things, let’s do it responsibly.’ Let’s investigate this thing in the right way, let’s talk about how we’re gonna make America safer and enlist Muslim Americans to help safeguard our country and look at anybody that might get radicalized.”

And that, apparently, is just what is going to happen in King’s hearings. Does King not realize who and what he is dealing with in Ellison? Is he aware of Ellison’s Muslim American Society-funded hajj, mentioned by Pamela Geller above, and of the Muslim American Society’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated goal (according to a captured internal document) of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? If King is unaware of all this, and of the smear campaign of Brotherhood groups in America against people like Emerson — a campaign he is now abetting — he is dangerously clueless. If he is aware of it, but is bowing to the public pressure the Islamic hate machine has brought upon him because of his hearings, he is not only clueless but cowardly as well.

Either way, his hearings are shaping up to be useless, or worse.