NEW YORK: A crowd has gathered in New York's Times Square to speak out against a planned congressional hearing on Muslims' role in homegrown terrorism. People at the rally Sunday were carrying signs saying “Today I am a Muslim, too.” They have heard from an imam who was an initial key supporter of plans to develop a mosque near ground zero. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf says the real enemy isn't Muslims or Islam, it's extremism. The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, US Rep. Peter King, says affiliates of Al-Qaeda are radicalizing some American Muslims and that he plans to hold hearings on March 10 on the threat they pose to the US. A Muslim US lawmaker said Sunday he would testify at controversial hearings, but stressed he felt they were too focused on one minority. Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American in the US Congress, said he would participate in the hearings, which have been derided as discriminatory, because he believed in “engaging in the process.” “You've got to offer an alternative view. And I do plan on saying that I challenge the basic premise of the hearings,” he told CNN. Ellison welcomed a congressional investigation into radicalization, but said that looking only at Islam is like looking into organized crime and talking only about the Russian community or focusing only on Irish gangs. “I just think it doesn't make sense to narrow in on a discrete insular group that has already been the target of a certain amount of discrimination,” he said. Peter King defended his call Sunday on CNN. “I've said time and time again, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding Americans but at this stage in our history, there is an effort to — to radicalize efforts within the Muslim community,” he said. He stressed that Americans inspired by Al-Qaeda pose a unique threat to public safety, more so than right-wing extremists, for example, opposed to President Barack Obama or left-wing environmentalists. “We're talking about the affiliates of Al-Qaeda who have been radicalizing, and there's been self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community, within a very small minority, but it's there. “To be having investigations into every type of violence will be suggesting an equivalency that's not there,” he said. “I mean, (US Attorney General) Eric Holder is not saying he's staying awake at night because of what's coming from anti-abortion demonstrators or coming from environmental extremists or from neo-Nazis. It's the radicalization right now in the Muslim community,” King said. The Newsday newspaper in King's home state of New York reported last week that the witnesses will include two US Muslims with family members who became radicalized, as well as an American Muslim who has criticized community leaders for not working closely enough with US law enforcement. But Japanese-American lawmaker Mike Honda blasted the plans in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, tying King's hearing to the World War-II era detention of Japanese-Americans in internment camps.
