Month: March 2011

Flailing After Muslims – NYTimes.com. On Monday, I spoke by phone with Colleen Kelly, a nurse practitioner from the Bronx whose brother, William Kelly Jr., was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. She belongs to a group called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and is opposed to Mr. King’s hearings. “I was trying to figure out why he’s doing this,” she said, “and I haven’t come up with a good answer.”  She recalled how people were stigmatized in the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the way that stigmas become the focus of attention and…

Peter King’s Obsession – NYTimes.com. 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.

The 9/10 Project – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan. We have gone from being the first country that established the principle that prisoners of war should be treated respectfully to a country that operates black sites and sends prisoners to other countries to be tortured–when we don’t torture them ourselves.

Eugene Robinson – Stoking irrational fears about Islam. For more than a century, the most remorseless and violent terrorist organization in the nation was the Ku Klux Klan. Watchdogs such as the Southern Poverty Law Center would be happy to share with King voluminous information about heavily armed militia groups out in the backwoods, training for some imagined Armageddon.

As Rep. Peter King’s Muslim hearings approach, his past views draw ire. In 1985, the Irish government boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City, the biggest celebration in the Irish-American calendar. The cause of its umbrage was Peter King, that year’s grand marshal and someone the Irish government said was an “avowed” supporter of a terrorist organization, the Irish Republican Army.

National Security — The King’s (Islamophobic) Speech. King’s public statements have revealed a deeply Islamophobic and paranoid streak in his thinking, and his list of proposed witnesses has shown a brazen anti-Islamic slant.