Peter King Faces the Same Media Buzz Saw That Tore into Ground Zero Mosque Critics

[DainBramaged]

The pounding Rep. Peter King is taking from the mainstream media over his hearings about Islamic extremism hasn’t altered his determination to pursue the subject. But according to Politico, it is making House Speaker John Boehner slightly uncomfortable. The website reports today that Boehner responded to queries about the hearings by simply saying “Chairman King is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee,” which it interprets as “not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

Politico may be reaching with this story alleging that Republicans are divided on the issue since, as its own story notes, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is an enthusiastic backer of King’s initiative. But Boehner’s noncommittal response may well indicate that some GOP leaders are aware of the potential for disaster that the hearings represent. While King is certainly right to view the growing danger of Muslim extremism as an appropriate topic for the Homeland Security Committee, the outcome of this battle may hinge more on who controls the narrative about the investigation rather than its findings about support for terrorism among Islamists.

Stories about these hearings have generally been told from the perspective of Muslim groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other King critics. Rather than taking a hard look at the way foreign-funded extremists have turned some mosques into hotbeds for Islamism and the way that CAIR and similar groups have run interference for these radicals, the frame of reference about King has been the charge that he is engaging in a McCarthy-like congressional fishing expedition. While it will be possible for King to recover from these charges with well-run informative hearings that avoid the histrionics that might turn off the public, the ability of his opponents to spin the event as a witch hunt no matter what anyone actually says or does should not be underestimated.

What King is running into is the same media buzz saw that faced critics of the plans to create an Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero in New York last summer. In that controversy, as I wrote in COMMENTARY last October, the ability of supporters of the project to smear anyone who questioned the propriety of the plan as bigots was the key to understanding the way the debate played out. The successful efforts of groups like CAIR to convince the mainstream media that American Muslims were facing an unprecedented wave of prejudice reduced the discussion to one of whether Americans were in favor of discrimination against adherents of Islam. The fact that this premise was utterly false made no difference to the way the media covered the story, since they had already swallowed the false assertion that Muslims were under siege.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/08/peter-king-faces-the-same-media-buzz-saw-that-tore-into-ground-zero-mosque-critics/



Stupid stupid haters. How this fuck keeps getting re-elected in NYC is beyond me.

[RoseMead]

1. And well he should

since he's as full of crap as the anti-mosqueteers.

[spanone]

2. he deserves everything they sling at him

[rgbecker]

3. Time to look behind the curtain when reading on the web.

From their "About" page. These guys are apparently worried that Peter King will fail like the anti "ground zero" mosque folks did.

"COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

Many of COMMENTARY’s articles have been controversial, and more than a few have been hugely influential, touchstones for debate and discussion in universities, among policy analysts in and out of government, within the ranks of professionals and community activists of all kinds, and in circles of serious thought worldwide. A large number of articles can be counted as landmarks of American letters and intellectual life. Agree with it or disagree with it, COMMENTARY cannot be ignored. To read it is to take part in the great American discussion.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/about/

[TheOther95Percent]

4. Peter King - Big IRA Supporter

And I not talking retirement accounts.

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_17568574?source=rss&...

e must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," King told a pro-IRA rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it."