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WASHINGTON -- Rep. Peter King has had around-the-clock security as he pushes forward with a hearing Thursday on the radicalization of Muslims in America, but a new Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans support King's plans.
The New York Republican who is hosting the first in a series of hearings on homegrown terror, will have extra security from Capitol Police who will be securing the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office, as the House Homeland Security Committee takes testimony.
That's on top of a larger security detail provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y., police, who have been guarding King for the past few months.
But a new Gallup poll shows that 52 percent of Americans say these hearings are appropriate, though support is split among party lines.
Sixty-nine percent of Republicans say the hearings are the right thing, while only 40 percent of Democrats say they are appropriate. Independents' views track closely to the national average at 51 percent supporting the hearings. Overall, 49 percent of Democrats polled on Tuesday say the hearings are not appropriate, compared to 42 percent of independents and 23 percent of Republicans.
King Draws Fire for Hearings on Radicalization of Muslims in U.S., But Most Americans Support Discussion - FoxNews.com
Addressing a conference on European Muslim radicalization, Ed Husain, a senior advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and former Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, urged participants to “be honest about the nature of the problem.” And the nature of the problem, he said, “is not Islamophobia – because it is Muslims who are being killed most by this global surge of extremism and terrorism.”
He pointed to Pakistan, where more than 40,000 people have been killed by terrorists over the last decade. “It is not poverty,” Husain continued, saying that if it were, then Muslims in countries like Mauritania and Bangladesh would be the most radicalized – “and they’re not.” “In fact, Osama bin Laden, as we all know, was from Saudi Arabia,” he noted, added that there were multi-millionaires now in the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL).
Husain, a practicing Muslim, told his Brussels audience it was convenient to argue that radicalization was caused by Muslim grievances over foreign policy. “If it was all about Western foreign policy then why was Belgium attacked [by ISIS last month]” – rather than Israel, he asked. Some of the grievances claimed by Muslims around the world were also shared by others, he said, citing India as an example. “Large chunks of India have become Pakistan and Bangladesh.
We don’t see Indians going around trying to blow themselves up to regain their lost land.” The battle of ideas, said Husain, is underpinned by “a combination of an ideology and a theology.” “The ideology is not Islam but Islamism, a perversion of the faith, a politicization of the faith,” he said, while the theology is “Salafism.” “Our enemies are fighting a battle of ideas; we cannot fight with a battle of bureaucracy, with a battle of procedures, and a battle of funding,” without understanding those ideas.
Husain listed several key manifestations of the radical ideology and theology:
A promotional musical video aired on state television this week encourages children to join the fight in Syria – ready to become martyrs in the process – with Jerusalem as the ultimate goal. The exiled opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which made available translated excerpts of the clip, said the initiative is reminiscent of Iran’s use of children in the 1980-88 war against Iraq. NCRI says the video was produced by the propaganda arm of the regime’s paramilitary Basij, who members are typically young volunteers. Affiliated to the IRGC, the Basij is notorious for its role in rights abuses, including the violent crackdown following the disputed presidential election in 2009.
In the clip, children are heard to sing, in part: “On my leader’s orders I am ready to give my life. The goal is not just to free Iraq and Syria. My path is through the sacred shrine, but my goal is to reach Jerusalem.” “I don’t regret parting from my country; In this just path I am wearing my martyrdom shroud … From Mashhad, I will walk on foot to Damascus. I am like the bird who flocks to the sacred shrine.” NCRI says “leader” refers to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the “sacred shrine” to revered Shi’ite sites in Syria. Mashhad is a city in north-eastern Iran. “This promotional clip manifests the anti-human nature of the regime which seeks to even mobilize the children of its own loyalists as cannon fodder,” Shahin Gobadi of the NCRI foreign affairs committee said in an email late Thursday. “But politically, it vividly points to Tehran’s strategic deadlock in Syria, that subsequent to dispatching Revolutionary Guards, foreign mercenaries, and even regular army, it has to resort to this kind of tactics. It is really telling.”
Among forces fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the sectarian-fueled civil war are Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi’ite militia, and Afghan Shi’ites – including allegedly undocumented Afghans in Iran, forced to fight to avoid deportation or imprisonment. The regime-affiliated Mehr News Agency reported early this month that at least 30 Basij members from one university had reportedly been killed in fighting in Syria and Iraq. Gobadi said the “disgraceful and inhumane” attempt to entice children to join the war would not help the regime get out of the “deadlock” he said it faces – “just as it failed to do so during the Iran-Iraq war.” “Using children in political propaganda is outrageous,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, founder of Iran Human Rights – a group of Iranian activists living outside the country – said early Friday. “What we see here, is a clear and serious violation of the rights of the child,” he said. “It reminds me of the 1980s when the Iranian authorities used to send children to the war against Iraq. Some of these children were used to clean the minefields.”
Amiry-Moghaddam said the child recruiting drive may also indicate that the regime given up on recruiting adults to fight in Syria. During the costly war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, tens of thousands of Iranian school children, drafted into the Basij, were deployed to the front where, according to published accounts they were used among other things to clear minefields with their bodies. Iran’s total casualty figures in the war vary widely, from around 155,000 to 750,000, according to Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to Basij, almost one-third of Iranian fatalities during the war were aged 15-19, and about three percent were younger than 14.
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