FREEDOM OF WORSHIP, BUT NOT FOR MUSLIMS

From the New York Times editorial board:

Peter King's Obsession

Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims. Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group’s methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.

Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn’t seem to be Mr. King’s real interest.

More here.

Part of me is like, "oh wow, there go the crazy Republicans again." But that just shows how numb I've become to this kind of bullshit over the years. I mean, after 9/11 for a while there we had the Bush administration officially pronouncing that the "War on Terror" was absolutely not a war on Muslims, which managed, apparently, to mute to some extent the vilest of anti-Islamic bigotry coming from America's loony right wing. With Bush now gone from office, however, and no real leader for the Republicans out there short of Rush Limbaugh and his idiot-ilk, the Muslim hate has ramped up among the conservative mob quite a bit as of late. But make no mistake: we've been hearing anti-Muslim rhetoric for nearly a decade, with only the worst of it manifesting in the Obama era.

That is, it's taken me a couple of days since these pathetic hearings were announced for me to fully realize just how fucked up a venture this is: the United States government is singling out Americans who practice one of the major world religions for HUAC style persecution and scrutiny.

Never mind the fact that there's just no evidence that the American Muslim community is undergoing some sort of process of "radicalization"--indeed, these hearings are the result of the decade of Muslim bashing I mentioned above, not a mass wave of American suicide bombers waiting in the wings, or anything else along these lines. Instead, try to imagine what it would be like if the House Homeland Security Committee announced that it was going to have highly confrontational hearings on how the Southern Baptists have evil in their hearts, or the Reform Jews, or the Pentecostals, or even the barbaric atheists. I mean, after all, "radicalization" essentially means "evil in their hearts" or something to that extent. In other words, these hearings exist only to brand American Muslims as bad people. That's what this really is, an exercise in Muslim bashing live on TV, an opportunity for gasbag Republicans to thump their chests and hurl prejudices at the expense of Americans who have done nothing but sincerely believe in their religion.

This is in blatant violation of the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But worse, it is deeply immoral, and the Republicans in pursuing this folly do nothing but bring shame down on all of us.

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