Hearing in Washington to focus on ways to prevent radicalization of Muslims

The fifth in a series of controversial hearings on Muslim radicalization has been scheduled for Wednesday morning by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the Long Island congressman who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

The 10:15 a.m. hearing at the Cannon House Office Building will focus on the Muslim community’s response to the previous four hearings, held last year from March through December, according to King’s office.

The previous hearings addressed the extent of radicalization of the Muslim community and its response; the threat of radicalization in U.S. prisons; recruitment by the al-Shabab radical group; and the threat to U.S. military communities posed by radicalization, exemplified by 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 people.

King issued a statement Tuesday acknowledging the controversy generated by the hearings, while rejecting accusations by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other critics that he was on a McCarthyesque witch hunt.

“I was vilified by the politically correct media, pandering politicians and radical groups such as CAIR,” King stated, “even though this issue was nonpartisan and of serious concern to national security and counterterrorism officials in the Obama administration.”

King said his scheduled witnesses include representatives from the American Muslim community: M. Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam”; and Qanta A.A. Ahmed, a doctor and author of “In the Land of Invisible Women,” a memoir of living and working as a western Muslim woman in Saudi Arabia.

Committee Democrats invited one witness, Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

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