King claims al-Qaida is targeting US muslims

AL-QAIDA is targeting Muslim Americans for recruits to terrorism and the community must do more to combat Islamic radicalisation, a lawmaker said as he opened hearings that have been criticised as a witch hunt.

Peter King, the chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee who called the hearings, has accused the Muslim community of refusing to cooperate with law enforcement and charged that preaching in some US mosques was leading to radicalisation.

“To combat this threat, moderate leadership must emerge from the Muslim community,” King said. “Today, we must be fully aware that homegrown radicalisation is part of al-Qaida’s strategy to continue attacking the United States.”

King denied accusations that the hearings were “radical or un-American” and said there was no comparison between the threat by al-Qaida and neo-Nazis, environmental extremists and other “isolated madmen.”

The New York congressman has been criticised by religious and civil rights leaders as going on a witch hunt for focusing on a single community, but he has defended the hearings, citing the open attempts by al-Qaida militants to recruit its members to launch attacks.

He has pointed to some individuals who have gone overseas to try to join militant groups, the attempt by a Saudi student caught in Texas as he was trying to build bombs and the failed attempt by a Pakistani-born US citizen to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square last year.

Democratic Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in the House, castigated the committee for its approach and broke down crying as he recounted the story of a 23-year-old Muslim paramedic who died when he responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York.

“After the tragedy, some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith,” he said.

“Some people spread false rumours and speculated that he was really with the attackers because he was a Muslim.”

The senior Democrat in the House, Michigan Representative John Dingell, urged King and the committee to ensure that their investigation would not “blot the good name or the loyalty or raise questions about the decency of Arabs or Muslims or other Americans.”

The focus of the hearings have also raised concerns within the Obama administration to the point that a senior White House official was dispatched to speak to Muslim leaders in Virginia where he told them they were “not part of the problem.”

The hearings have inspired days of protests by critics who said the hearings were overbroad and anti-Muslim and yesterday’s hearing opened amid tightened security.