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Peter King Hearings “Despicable”
ByMark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, calls the hearings in Congress by New York Republican Peter King “despicable.” A number of critics have referred to the hearings as a modern-day form of McCarthyism designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. King has refused calls to broaden the hearing to examine right-wing militias or any non-Muslim groups. In this video clip (16:38) from Democracy Now, Potok points out that the real threat of “radicalization” in the U.S. comes from domestic, far-right, white supremacists:
The hearings are already hugely successful in terms of promoting King’s public profile and in stoking the low moral ground of Islamophobia. Despicable indeed.
It is clearly a racialized and religiously bigoted attack on Middle Eastern Muslims, as there are far more Christian extremists in this country than from any other religious group. The largest terrorist attack by a native religious extremist was by Tim McVeigh, a Christian rightist.
[...] especially Muslim immigrants that were supposedly “destroying Europe.” In the U.S., Rep. Peter King (R-NY), led the way in fomenting Islamophobia through a series of congressional hearings that targeted Muslims living in the U.S. as potential [...]