America’s new Joseph McCarthy

According to Congressman Peter King, his country’s Muslims are just not doing enough.

Congressman Peter King of Long Island, New York, begins the first of a series of hearings on the terror threat posed by radicalised American Muslims today. King is chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and from that chair he will be asking why American Muslims are not cooperating as that country comes under attack from within.

King had an alter ego, the fictional hero of his novel on the same theme, Vale of Tears (2004, Taylor Trade Publishing) — which I have not had the pleasure of reading — who is evocatively called Sean Cross. But King’s crusade (he prefers to call it investigation) has seen the ego and the alter ego fuse into one over time.

In the book, when terrorists bomb targets in New York, Cross must find the people behind the attacks. His investigations lead him not to some cave in Afghanistan, but to a mosque in an upscale New York neighbourhood. The terrorists were home-grown — like California Basmati rice, say. Seeds possibly sourced elsewhere, radicalised indigenously by clerics whose mission was to destroy America.

New York Magazine picks out two quotes that show Cross’s surprise and disgust: “It was dirtbags living here a few years… Right here among all of us.” And then he issues a warning to the respectable (till then) Muslim surgeon who has key information about the attacks: “You need to give your own people up.”

This is precisely what will be asked of the Muslim community in the US through these hearings. According to King, his country’s Muslims are just not doing enough.

The hearings echo Senator Joe McCarthy’s hounding of suspected communists in the 1950s. Well that one didn’t go too well for the senator, who was driven to drink and death a few years after. The most withering attack came from the great broadcaster Edward Murrow, who didn’t spare the rest of America either: “We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” The question Murrow raised then can be asked now as well.

Ironically, it comes at a time when people in the Arab world are asserting their own right to freedom — overthrowing dictators whom the West had supported for decades.

In the same broadcast, Murrow had said that McCarthy merely exploited the “situation of fear” that had been created. In the present instance, the church of Islamophobia is well under construction. King, who is eyeing a Senate seat in 2012, has recently taken the project over, but there are voices like Brigitte Gabriel’s that now lead the choir.

Gabriel was a native of Lebanon and she survived the war there. Her second book They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It (2008, St Martin’s Press) is (approximately) a non-fiction version of King’s 2004 novel. Gabriel goes on speaking tours and wins applause for her rather simplistic descriptions of everything. Radical Muslims: Anyone who prays five times a day. God: Their god is “something they call Allah”, different from “our God… the God of love.”

Gabriel’s organisation, American Congress for Truth, has over 150,000 members and seems to have grown at a much faster rate than the homegrown terrorist population. Starting with very little money, it is now rich enough to pay her $178,000 a year. The money comes from those who share her views.

Black American standup comic Chris Rock calls it “hateriotism”. In a piece he did on white Americans’ response to the war on terror, he says it was cool till the time these guys were saying (in that order): Screw foreigners, the French, Arabs… But the moment they said “illegal aliens” he “started listening”. “Because niggers and Jews are next! Any day now! That train’s never late!”

Rock’s train will come in a little later, thanks to a stop Congressman King insists it makes — at the station of Muslim Americans.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2011.