09/23/2014 Katie Pavlich: Shed political correctness in combatting ISIS
Source: The Hill
Three years ago, former Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Pete King, a Republican congressman from New York, announced the first in a series of controversial hearings he planned to hold about combating homegrown terror and radicalization in Muslim-American communities. King’s decision didn’t come out of the blue, but after U.S. Army Pvt. William Long was murdered in revenge by Abdulhakim Muhammad outside of a recruitment center in Arkansas. Muhammad was known as Carlos Bledsoe before converting to Islam and being influenced by radicals.
Minutes after King’s announcement, emotional outrage and hysteria erupted, quickly turning a serious issue into a circus on Capitol Hill and in the media. This behavior continued each time a new hearing was held.
Leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s “largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization,” with close ties to the terrorist group Hamas, took to radio and television airwaves to express their disdain. They declared the hearings a forum for Islamaphobia sponsored by members of Congress and said King was engaged in a witch hunt based on religious bigotry.
When the day of the first hearing came, tensions were high. I remember walking into the committee room and immediately noticing extra security, a lot of it. Political correctness was credited throughout testimony, including by founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, for the expansion of radicalism America.
Years later, while groups like CAIR and their liberal friends in Congress and the White House have been beating society into submission over not discussing Islamic radicalization in our communities, terrorists have continued their plotting and recruiting. Today the United States still faces a serious homegrown Islamic terrorist threat — with a new level of brutality.
On June 25, 2014, a man named Ali Muhammad Brown murdered 19-year-old New Jersey teenager Brendan Tevlin. Tevlin was shot eight times after Brown singled him out while he was alone at an intersection. Just a few weeks before killing Tevlin, Brown murdered three other men across the country in Seattle. Two of them were gay.