By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, March 9, 2011, at 8:47 AM ET
=snip=
These sweeping allegations—particularly the claim that law enforcement agents "throughout the country" are getting little or "no cooperation from Muslim leaders and imams"—don't jibe with
http://sanford.duke.edu/centers/tcths/about/news_release20110202.php">a study issued last month by a consortium of North Carolina university researchers. The study found that in cases where Muslim-American terrorist suspects were brought to the attention of U.S. officials, "
http://sanford.duke.edu/centers/tcths/about/documents/Kurzman_Muslim-American_Terrorism_Since_911_An_Accounting.pdf">the largest single source of initial information (48 of 120 cases) involved tips from the Muslim-American community."
Last Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, Candy Crowley cited the North Carolina study and asked King, "Doesn't that tell you there is cooperation there?" King replied: "
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1103/06/sotu.01.html">No. I'm aware of a number of cases in New York where the community has not been cooperative." King cited a guy who "went to two mosques in Suffolk County in Long Island, said he wanted to engage in jihad. They said we don't do it, but never told the police. And then he went off to Afghanistan. So there's just one example. I can give others." But King has never named more than three or four such cases. In his March 6 profile, New York's Robert Kolker reported that King "
http://nymag.com/news/politics/peter-king-2011-3/">refuses to name the sources who claim Muslims are uncooperative," claiming that "they're always off the record with him."
Monday on Fox News, King said his upcoming hearings would feature an American Muslim who "feels very strongly that the current Muslim leadership is not doing its job." A day later, King told the same network that when Muslims come forward to report suspicions of dangerous extremism, "they do not get the cooperation from the imams and from their leaders." He brushed off the North Carolina study, accusing its authors of "leaving out any number of terrorist financing cases which there was no support from the Muslim community on."
Through this phrase—the "Muslim community"—King has casually substituted unnamed Muslim "leaders" for Muslim citizens as representatives of American Islam. Yesterday on MSNBC, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post told King, "You have alleged that the Muslim American community has not been forthcoming in helping law enforcement officials deal with radicalization." King replied: "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHzMLtc7oGY">I talk to cops and counterterrorism people on the ground all the time, and they get virtually no cooperation." Robinson accused King of assuming "that the Muslim American community, a religious minority in this country, is somehow abetting and aiding and giving shelter to this process of radicalization, when that is clearly not the truth." King shot back: "It is the truth."
Full article:
http://www.slate.com/id/2287708/Lots of follow up links within these websites which debunk King's Islamophobic fearmongering for political purposes...
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