WASHINGTON: Muslim-Americans are concerned and frustrated over the presenting of findings on Wednesday on “radicalization” of Muslims in the United States by a US Congressman. “I think this is really hard to understand because the real problem is how we Muslims are treated in this country by conservatives,” said Falls City, Virginia resident Omar Mohsen. He told Bikyamasr.com that the hearings themselves “are the problem and will create anger and possibly anti-American sentiment.” The study and hearings, pushed by Peter King of New York, the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, was titled “The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization Within Their Community.” King and others attempted to draw conclusions from their interviews, but nothing conclusive was garnered. The previous hearings had covered the topics of radicalization and response within the Muslim American community, radicalization in prisons, terrorist recruitment and threats to military communities. “Fifteen months ago this committee – the Homeland Security Committee, which was formed in the wake of the tragic attacks of 9/11 – held the first in a series of hearings into the radicalization of the Muslim American community,” King said in his opening statement. “The necessity of these hearings was obvious – and there should have been bipartisan support,” he added. Ironically, King's comments came less than a week after an Iranian-American teenager in Georgia was refused an iPad by the store after she was overheard speaking Farsi. For Mohsen, hearings should be addressing the discrimination of the Muslim community. “The Muslim-American community has always been supportive of the United States and we are citizens, so these attacks are simply wrong,” continued the man, who said he worked as a translator for the US military in Iraq. Referencing past opposition, King stressed the necessity of the hearings and said they'd led to numerous revelations. King released a report with the committee's key findings, including the severity of the threat of radicalized Muslim Americans to homeland security, the presence of al-Qaida recruitment in the country – specifically in prisons and military communities – and what the findings said was a lack of cooperation between Muslim Americans and law enforcement to “confront the Islamist ideology driving radicalization.” Top committee Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi remained skeptical of the hearings. “We are holding today's hearing to discuss the effect of previous hearings. I am not sure we have ever had a hearing to gauge the effects of prior hearings,” Thompson said. “Given the challenges the nation faces in homeland security . . . I am not sure that a hearing to gauge the effects of our hearings is the most effective use of congressional time and attention.” Three of the four witnesses, all Muslims – M. Zuhdi Jasser, the president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Islamic culture instructor to the US military; and Qanta A.A. Ahmed, a physician and political and religious writer – supported the hearings and said they'd opened up a much-needed dialogue within their community. “Immediately after my testimony, we received literally hundreds of e-mails, over 90 percent of which were extraordinarily complimentary, from American Muslims,” Jasser said of his organization. Jasser has asserted continually that the American Muslim community needs to do more to differentiate between spiritual Islam and political Islam. “I'm a devout Muslim, and I'm doing this because I acknowledge that there's a problem,” Jasser said in an interview with KansasCity.com before the hearing. “We want to wake up our own community to things that radicalize them. Until you have that platform,” he said, there isn't going to be increased initiative. Still, overall the hearings have fomented anger from the Muslim-American community, who continues to say they struggle on a daily basis to be accepted by other Americans.
