VIDEO: Ellison to King: This is how American Muslims help fight terrorism

New York Republican Congressman Peter King said the point of the controversial Homeland Security Committee “Islamic radicalization” hearings he is holding this week is to discover how Muslim Americans can help fight terrorism. He got an answer from Keith Ellison, a Muslim Representative from Minnesota, who broke down this morning and sobbed during testimony. He told the story of Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Muslim 23-year-old paramedic and New York City police cadet who helped America fight terrorism by doing his job and rushing to the Twin Towers on 9/11 and giving up his life to try to save the people trapped inside.

King’s hearings are being criticized as a government-sanctioned exercise in ethnic scapegoating. The question at the heart of the hearings, critics say, is accusatory. Could any group — much less a loosely affiliated ethnic or religious group– do enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism?

What’s more, as ThinkProgress pointed out Wednesday, the assumption behind the hearings is flat-out wrong. King said he believes Islamic radicalism poses the main terrorist threat to the United States. “It makes no sense to talk about other types of extremism,” he said, “when the main threat to the United States today is… al Qaida.”

Yet here are the facts as reported by ThinkProgress and compiled by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) based on records available to everyone:

Since the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, Muslims have been involved in 45 domestic terrorist plots. Meanwhile, non-Muslims have been involved in 80 terrorist plots.

In fact, right-wing extremist and white supremacist attack plots alone outnumber plots by Muslims, with both groups being involved in 63 terror plots, 18 more plots than Muslim Americans have been involved in.

So far, King’s Homeland Security Committee does not appear to have scheduled any hearings to ask how the members of the right-wing extremist and white supremacist communities can help keep America safe from terrorism.

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