Oh No! Peter King is the New Joe McCarthy or Something

Nothing like becoming hysterical over the prospect of holding hearings on radical Islam in America.

Rep. Pete King's proposal to hold hearings on the "radicalization" of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department.

Make that the Worst Ideas Department.

Just substitute the word "movie" for "Muslim" and you've got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts.

McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood.

What's next, internment camps?

How stupid. Has King even remotely hinted at internment camps? Of course not. But I'll say this much: If these maniacs detonate a nuke or dirty bomb on our soil, all bets are off.

Even Eric Holder is out there not pointing out the obvious: We've got a major problem on our hands with homegrown jihadis. But I guess he's just a fearmonger or something.

In a rare and wide-ranging interview, the attorney general disclosed chilling, new details about the evolving threat of homegrown terror, and touched on topics ranging from Wikileaks to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

What was uppermost on his mind, however, is the alarming rise in the number of Americans who are more than willing to attack and kill their fellow citizens.

"It is one of the things that keeps me up at night," Holder said. "You didn't worry about this even two years ago -- about individuals, about Americans, to the extent that we now do. And -- that is of -- of great concern."

That's nonsense. Ask anyone in the Bush administration and they'd tell you otherwise.

"The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens -- raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born," he said.

In the last 24 months, Holder said, 126 people have been indicted on terrorist-related charges, Fifty of those people are American citizens.

So a logical step--holding Congressional hearings to look into the problem, is immediately rejected with hysterical comparisons to Joe McCarthy. Despite revisionist history, McCarthy was proven correct about the infiltration of Communist in our country.

Holder and his boss could tomorrow announce hearing on radical Islam and the left would openly welcome it as thinking outside the box. But a Republican does it and he's accused of being a McCarthyite. You just can't win with some people who are more concerned with offending those who want to murder them than they are protecting themselves. Sounds like the Daily News hack has been reading too many CAIR press releases.

Given the string of terrorist plots in the past few years that can be directly linked to radical Islam, it’s reasonable for the U.S. Congress to devote some time to studying what’s been going on. But, predictably, the group the mainstream media treat as the mouthpiece of American Muslims is screaming bloody murder about the prospect of such hearings. In fact, Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said such hearings will be an “anti-Muslim witch hunt.”

It is true that any congressional hearing, no matter how important the topic or germane the line of questioning might be to public policy, can be an excuse for shameless grandstanding by politicians who know little about the subject matter but are hungry for a good sound bite. But Hooper and CAIR have their own agenda here, and it is far more sinister than that of any of the publicity-hungry members of Congress who participate in such forums.

Founded as a political front for a group that funneled money to the Hamas terrorist group (the Holy Land Foundation, which has since been closed down by the Treasury Department) back in the early 1990s, CAIR poses as a civil-rights group for Arabs and Muslims, but its true purpose is to put a reasonable face on a radical ideology. It rationalizes anti-American and anti-Jewish acts of terror and seeks to demonize Israel and its supporters while falsely portraying American Muslims as the victims of a mythical reign of terror since 9/11. Most insidious is its attempt to deny the very existence of radical Islamism, either here or abroad. Indeed, during a debate in which I participated at Baruch College in New York City last month, a spokesman for CAIR claimed it was racist to even use the word “Islamist” or to dare point out the danger from radical Islam to highlight the way foreign interests in this country have funded mosques in which such radicals have found a platform. Though there has been no backlash against Muslims, CAIR has been successful in manipulating the mainstream media into claims of victimization. Indeed, rather than listen to the evidence of the threat from Muslim radicals, we can expect many in the media to hew to CAIR’s talking points about “witch hunts” in their coverage of King’s hearings.

It's already happening and it's called intellectual laziness