Peter King Pioneered the Persecution of American Muslims
In May 2010, a radicalized Pakistani immigrant named Faisal Shahzad loaded his SUV with explosives and parked it in Times Square for detonation. Shahzad’s ambition, to kill Americans as vengeance for the war on terrorism, was thwarted by three street vendors who told cops about a car that was mysteriously smoking. One of them was a Senegalese Muslim immigrant named Alioune Niasse. Niasse did everything a conscientious person ought to do – he saw something and he said something — and yet his example factored not at all to a Long Island congressman who looked at Muslims like Niasse and saw terrorists in disguise.
That was Peter King, the three-decade Capitol Hill veteran who announced his retirement on Monday. While King had stiff competition, no legislator did more to demonize American Muslims than he did. Long before there was Donald Trump, there was Peter King.
King encouraged law enforcement spying in mosques, an invasion that no religious group in America would ever tolerate, when he wasn’t complaining that America hosted too mosques in the first place. He fanned the flames of anti-Muslim hysteria over an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. With a chairman’s gavel in his hand, King legitimized anti-Muslim persecution by holding a series of hearings resting on the bigoted and false premise that American Muslims were insufficiently committed to thwarting terrorism. (One 2011 study found that more than 20 percent of federal cases targeting Islamist terrorism began with tips from Muslims or with the cooperation of suspects’ relatives.)
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