"Extent of radicalization among American Muslims" hearing; Rassmussen: 39% Say U.S. Govt. Not Focusing Enough on Threat of Domestic Islamic Terrorism

If, like me, you don't get C-SPAN 3 as part of your cable or satellite package, you can watch the House Homeland Security Comm. congressional hearing titled "Extent of radicalization among American Muslims" that I wrote about yesterday at:
http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

The entire four-and-a-half hour meeting will be re-run again this afternoon on C-SPAN 3, and will also be shown in its entirety on C-SPAN starting at 10 p.m. tonight.

If you want to see a tone-deaf article that completely mis-characterizes both the purpose of the hearing and the reason why it's long-overdue, I've got just the article for you, and trust me, the confusion is neither accidental nor is it due to language or translation problems.

That's my way of saying to those of you who have wondered from time-to-time, via emails, why I mention so many things here that are related to either Swedish or Scandinavian sources -short answer: because I can and they're interesting- that I'm not going to give you a link here to something that's all in svenska.
I'm really not.

No, the offending article that stands common sense on its head is one that is easily found on one of the world's most popular media sites, The Telegraph, which I have been reading in print or online, for more than thirty years.

That dates back to my days at IU in Bloomington when I had one of the most distinguished professors of comparative politics and British politics in the country as a teacher and sounding board, the late James B. Christoph.
http://www.grad.ubc.ca/awards/james-b-christoph-prize

I took every undergraduate class on British politics that he taught and was fortunate enough to be among several British Politics students asked to attend an annual barbecue he hosted at his home for folks who were really, really into the subject.

He was a great professor who knew his subject inside-and-out and inspired his students to think more clearly and wisely for themselves.
What else can you ask for?

Prof. Christoph's wisdom, keen insight and thoughtful comments on the interplay between politics, human behavior and cultural tradition, and why some systems work and others don't, during what were then the early days of the Margaret Thatcher administration, still ring in my ears.

What also rings in my ears are the names of the myriad books and the newspapers he both required -and strongly recommended- we read, even if we might disagree with them politically, to get the true nuance and context.
Obviously, for both reasons of history and the quality of its writing, The Telegraph was on that list.
That was enough for me.

A few years ago, once I started this blog, I even ran some of their widgets on this site in order to give them the widest possible circulation, but they had technical problems too often so I had to remove them.

Early this morning, I left a comment at The Telegraph relative to the Alex Spillius column titled, US hearing on radical Islam: a waste of time, but not witch hunt http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alexspillius/100079257/us-hearing-on-radical-islam-a-waste-of-time-but-not-witch-hunt/

Spillius definitely seems like he could pass that rigorous employment process at NPR and start work tomorrow. And yes, you know exactly what I mean when I say that.

Today's Rassmussen Reports has a poll detailing results of how Americans feel about some of the issues mentioned in today's hearing:

39% Say Government Not Focusing Enough on Threat of Domestic Islamic Terrorism
Thursday, March 10, 2011

A House committee is expected to begin controversial hearings today about the potential danger of domestic Islamic terrorism, and a sizable number of voters think the government is not paying enough attention to this possible threat. Most voters still worry, too, about homegrown terrorist attacks.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 39% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the federal government does not focus enough on the potential threat from domestic Islamic terrorism, although nearly as many (38%) say the government’s anti-terrorism focus is about right.

Read the rest of the report at: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/march_2011/39_say_government_not_focusing_enough_on_threat_of_domestic_islamic_terrorism

For more information, see: www.homeland.house.gov

Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, its President and Founder, had many good common sense points to make, esp. between 1 and 1:30 p.m., the last hour of the meeting, and I encourage you to go to their website and learn more about their efforts.

Their goal: "taking back Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists."
http://www.aifdemocracy.org/

Just common sense - Peter King's long-overdue hearings on Muslim radicalism in U.S. gets backing from an unexpected ally at The WaPo: Ruth Marcus

Above, 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License

While living in Arlington County, I followed the 9/11 Commission hearings VERY closely, more than just about anyone I knew, watching or taping many of them off of C-SPAN, and, consequently, often staying-up late at night to catch up on their activities. Though it seems obvious now, while I'd heard from many sources that some of the hijackers had used Broward County Library computers to access the Internet to send messages -and book their flights- it never dawned on me to think about where, specifically, they had lived in South Florida.

But despite how much of the hearings I watched, I couldn't see everything, so it wasn't until another Washington-area friend who worked on Capitol Hill -also originally from Florida- pointed it out to me one night at a sports bar, that I found out that 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta lived in Hollywood.
In fact, 4.6 miles from my father's home in Hallandale Beach.

(Not the subject of the column below, true, but just wanted to mention it all the same. Also relevant: On the morning of 9/11, I was working directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Dept. of Justice, the FBI and The National Archives. I was working on a litigation project for the law firm Crowell & Moring, a project involving DOD that was supposed to send me and my team to Dayton for a few weeks that Fall, but that was cancelled for obvious reasons.
From the firm's large windows facing Pennsylvania Avenue -and even more so from the large balcony that overlooked the street that were clearly perfect viewing for Inauguration Day festivities- I and the dozens of us on my flooor could clearly see the dark smoke arising in the SW from The Pentagon, just past our view looking towards the Old Post Office.
More about my 9/11 experiences in Washington, D.C. here, from a Sept. 2011 post, 
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html)

Well, I've been sitting on them for a while now.
Wondering, wondering, wondering just when to run them in this space, but this excellent common sense perspective by liberal columnist Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post about voluble Rep. Peter King of Long Island, and his resolve to finally have some long overdue congressional hearings on radical Islam in the U.S., despite protests from the usual suspects and however an imperfect a vehicle for that overdue development she thinks he might be, just might be the sign I've been waiting for.

So what's the them?
My sign to let you know that coming soon to the blog will be some delicious articles, columns and video about Islamic radicalism and not-so-democratic Muslim immigrants (not at all interested in assimilation) that I guarantee you you haven't seen or heard about elsewhere in the American Mainstream Media.

At least, as represented by the Miami Heralds and NPRs of the world, where news stories and real-life actualities that don't fit their political or social template never see the light of day in print or make the airwaves.

That's largely because even some liberals can see the lie of the fiction long articulated by the MSM, in the U.S. as well as in Europe, that EVERY Muslim -esp. immigrants- are just like Jane & John Q. Public, whether they live in Northern Virginia, Queens, London, Paris or Malmö.
Nope.

Some are but more than you think are NOT.
Just because the press wants it to be so doesn't change reality -or human behavior.

I know something of this first-hand because my first roommate at IU was a great guy named Salim who just also happened to be a Kenyan-born Muslim from Oman, who was at school on a World Health Organization (WHO) scholarship.

Salim was very appreciative of the opportunity he had to live and study in the United States and loved IU and the beauty and friendliness of Bloomington more than many of my other friends, who were blase about it, and because of his personality and willingness to talk about what he knew about growing-up in a life different than ours, Salim made friends easily.

A later roommate in the Washington area was a completely different story. I had known many Iranian-born friends as a kid growing-up in North Miami Beach, even seeing Grease at a drive-in with two -count 'em two- ridiculously cute and vibrant Iranian sisters in our family's convertible when I was in high school.

Their brother was a soccer teammate of mine and as I've related here previously, I sometimes went with him and his family to anti-Shah rallies at the JFK Torch of Freedom on Biscayne Blvd. in downtown Miami because members of his own family had been tortured or killed by the Savak. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912364,00.html

The Iranian-born medical student I was somewhat forced to live with in Arlington once another roommate moved-out just weeks before the lease was up -a know-it-all with with a real superiority complex- told me plenty of amazing stories about ways that Iranian students he knew played the State Dept. reps in Europe at the embassy or consulates for fools, in order to get visas.
They accomplished this by telling them the appropriate narrative that would allow them to be admitted into the country.

He said there even was a list of which State Dept. consular offices were more easy to fool than others, and since it was important to get to the U.S., they didn't mind the additional costs of flying out of whatever European country they might be living in in order to get to a consular office with a reputation for letting people in. Fly from Germany to Copenhagen or Portugal or... He knew that for a fact because it worked for HIM.

If college students knew how to game the system, do you honestly think that well-trained people with nefarious intentions and unlimited resources can't do even more?

Some people can never let go of their internal anger, never really want to fit in and are keenly disposed to wreck havoc on civil society wherever they can, even if that means corrupting freedoms or denying other people's guaranteed rights.

And when they're caught on film, they... yes, often celebrate their anti-social behavior.
That is, until they realize that it will make them look bad once it is shown on TV or the Internet. That moment of clarity is always a sight to see!

As you will soon see here for yourself, there's almost nothing better on TV then when the often-dubious world of Reality TV slams head-first into the behavior of the 'Real World' that the Left and its apologists in the media has been making excuses for for years.

That it happened in Sweden is not so surprising, sorry to say, but I can't help but think that if it had happened on a British TV show, where the conversation would've been in engelska, we'd all have long since seen the video by now and that it would be sure-fire water cooler conversation once 20/20 or Nightline or Sixty Minutes highlighted the behavior for Americans.

That is, if people still really have water cooler conversation as shown on The Office, instead of sipping their dopey Five-Hour drinks and $4 fruity organic drinks from their desk when there's a perfectly good cold Dr. Pepper in the soda machine looking to add drinking satisfaction.

-----

The Washington Post
Islamic radicalism: The questions that Rep. Peter King is right to ask
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 9, 2011

One of the odder exchanges I've ever seen during a congressional hearing involved Attorney General Eric Holder, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith and the phrase "radical Islam."

Smith, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee last May, cited three recent terrorist incidents: the Fort Hood shooting rampage, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. "Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?" he asked Holder.

The attorney general did his best not to go there.
"There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions," he said.
"I think you have to look at each individual case."

Smith tried again - and again.
Holder repeatedly resisted, before grudgingly acknowledging the obvious. "I certainly think that it's possible that people who espouse a radical version of Islam have had an ability to have an impact on people like" the accused Times Square bomber, he said.

Read the rest of the excellent column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030804487.html

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Dr. Pepper TV commercial, 1960's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpByXzdMQfk

When I first got to Bloomington in August of 1979 and told people I met at my dorm, Briscoe Quad, or people I met on and off the IU campus that I was from North Miami Beach, it was very quickly obvious that they imagined that my life down here in high school on weekends was probably not unlike the end of this commercial, albeit many years later, with grill parties at the beach, throwing frisbees and footballs around and cute girls prancing around everywhere...

Believe me, it was very disappointing to have to tell them the truth about how boring and mundane late 1970's life in NMB was, or how many great opportunities or locales were wasted.

Haulover Beach on the Intercoastal side could get crazy on weekends, but it was never fun like life depicted in films or TV about teen life in SoCal, whom I envied.
You know, where people describe every other thing they go to as "epic"?
If only we had had cell phones and digital cameras and the Internet then...