Thursday, June 21, 2012

Question hearings on radicalization of American Muslims is the only radicalization to consider.

by Gary Berg-Cross

Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security Peter King has a new hearing underway - "The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization Within Their Community." On paper it is supposed to draw conclusions from the 4 previous hearings. I'm not sure there is a simple conclusion to reached and this seems more political than a reasoned policy discussion. You can question the hearings’ premise that radicalization of American Muslims is the only radicalization to consider. Texas' Al Green, the grandson of a Christian minister & Democratic lawmaker, used his 5 minutes to question why there are no hearings on radical Christians as well.

The Raw Story reported that he "oppose[s] hearings that don’t focus on the entirety of radicalization.... People who see the hearings and never hear about the hearing on the radicalization of Christianity have to ask themselves, ‘Why is this missing?... Why don’t we go to the next step and ask, how is that a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white female in the United States of America can become radicalized to the point of wanting to do harm to this country? We don’t have that type of hearing."

King seems to brush off the question of balance with “To deny that there’s any correlation between the Muslim faith and the biggest threat to this country today defies credulity."

2 comments:

Hos said...

I hate to say this but King could be right. Yes, I know about the Hutaree militias and other christian nutjobs. But the threat of violence in today's world comes mostly from Islam. To put the two of them on the same level is false equivalence. Whether that is the "biggest threat" is debatable; I'd argue that a meltdown of euro is probably a bigger threat.

Don Wharton said...

Not only is a meltdown of the Euro a bigger threat, apprantly we have a greater chance of being injured or killed by our own furniture than any Islamic militants. How many of us are terrified by our furniture?