DANGER FROM WITHIN: Faisal Shahzad is a naturalized US citizen who plotted against America when he tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square. Tomorrow’s House hearings will probe the radical Islamists within. (
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If you believe the useful idiots, Republican Pete King is a grave threat to the sweet harmony of America. His congressional hearing tomorrow on homegrown Islamic radicals is, The New York Times declares, “designed to stoke fear against Muslim Americans.”
It’s a scurrilous charge, but also an odd one, even for the hysterics at the Times editorial page. To make it, they had to ignore terror warnings from the Obama administration, with which the paper has a mutual slobbering relationship. Both Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recently raised red flags not against the hearing — but against the very threat of homegrown Islamists that King is investigating.
“It is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Holder said. “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who, for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation.”
Napolitano warned about Americans “who have become radicalized and associated with al Qaeda or Islamist terrorism beliefs and techniques and tactics.”
Even President Obama’s national security adviser, Denis McDonough, whose Sunday speech to a Muslim group the Times said was designed to counter King, concedes the radicalization point.
“McDonough called me before he gave the speech,” King told me yesterday. “He said go ahead with the hearing. He said it’s serious, and we want Congress to be involved.”
Against that backdrop, King, the new chairman of the House panel on Homeland Security, would be derelict if he didn’t dig into the issue. With over 50 domestic-terror plots uncovered in the last two years, an average of nearly one every two weeks, the hearings are long overdue.
“This is the threat that faces our country,” he said. “Al Qaeda and groups like it said they are trying to radicalize members of the American Muslim community. We’ve got to face it.”
He is clear-eyed about the need to thread the needle between demonizing all Muslims and exposing the truth about how some mosques and prisons act as breeding grounds for terrorists. He also remains refreshingly blunt in escaping the handcuffs of political correctness.
“If the problem was the White Citizens Council, it wouldn’t make any sense to investigate African Americans,” he said.
His refrain that “the overwhelming majority of American Muslims are good people” is coupled with the charge that they have been “misled and betrayed” by many Islamic advocacy organizations. He cites CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which calls itself a Muslim civil-rights organization even though the Justice Department labeled it an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a 2007 case involving terrorist funding by groups pretending to be Islamic charities.
With enemies like that, King is on safe ground to explore the danger. His witness list tomorrow will include Christian and Muslim families who saw loved ones turn radical.
“We want to show how systemic it is, how the programming works,” he said. He mentioned one black American who grew distant from his family, then took down his poster of Martin Luther King Jr. and gave away the family dog as he opted for jihad.
“One of the requirements for recruits is that they have to cut off all connections with their prior life,” he said.
Rep. King often has been at odds with Obama’s team, but he believes the gap is closing, citing the shared concern on homegrown terror and the decision to restart military trials and keep some terrorists in prison without trials.
“They realize the world is a lot more dangerous than they thought it was when they first came in,” he said.
We can only hope. Meanwhile, we have King to thank for daring to dig into an inconvenient truth.
PENSION TENSION FOR LIU
City Comptroller John Liu finally has waded into the pension battle, and it’s clear whose side he’s on. Hint: It’s not taxpayers’.
“Public employees are under attack in New York and across the country,” Liu said in a statement yesterday. “While those who work in the private sector are understandably worried about their own retirement security, misplaced threats against firefighters, police officers and schoolteachers only fuel a race to the bottom promoting insecurity for everyone.”
That sound you hear is Liu’s bean-counter duty being thrown under the bus. He is in full pander mode to the unions and their hand puppet, the Working Families Party, that helped elect him.
Although he’s a trustee of city pension funds, Liu doesn’t mention that costs have skyrocketed in the last nine years. Taxpayers will shell out $8.5 billion for pensions in the next fiscal year, up from $1.5 billion in 2002.
Mayor Bloomberg recently put those costs in personal terms: Each New Yorker who pays city income taxes pays an average of more than $3,000 a year just for government worker pensions.
Contrary to Liu’s fictional narrative, private workers aren’t just worried about their own retirement. They’re outraged at the rip-off by public workers–a rip-off that Liu obviously intends to defend.
His fiction extends to a new program he’s launching that, he promises, will protect both public pensions and the city’s fiscal health. Good grief. That’s like saying Dr. Kevorkian will ease your pain.
One of the two groups Liu is using, the National Institute on Retirement Security, supports — surprise — defined benefit plans like the ones city workers are fighting to keep. And, more surprise, its founding organizations are dominated by unions and administrators of government pension plans.
“Scapegoating and inflammatory rhetoric cannot serve as a substitute for the real facts and sensible reform,” Liu says.
Neither can pandering.
Rikers suits cig-nificant
Today’s quiz is Know Your Mayor. It’s based on a Post report involving one scandal and one oddball fact at Rikers Island.
The scandal is that the city paid almost $37 million, or an average of $1,130 each to 26,131 former inmates, to settle a lawsuit over strip searches. Some recipients are back in jail and threatening to sue again if guards cross them.
The oddball fact is that, although smoking is not allowed at Rikers, the payoffs are causing a boom in cigarettes, with black-market butts reportedly going for $200 a pack.
So which do you think will upset City Hall more — the waste of $37 million, or smoking violations at Rikers?
Did I have to ask?
Quinn ‘speech’ impediment
Never say the City Council is good for nothing. Its home page is good for a laugh.
“Are you a small business that needs help accessing credit?” it asks strangely. Then there’s this description of a speech by Speaker Christine Quinn.
“In speech, Speaker Quinn tackled issues ranging from job creation and growth the City still greatly needs to the protection of valuable affordable housing to parking violations that are a source of frustration for New York drivers.”
You don’t say!