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January 6, 2011 – Faith McDonnell, Rep. Peter King & Sara Carter
On today’s show Faith McDonnell of The Institute on Religion and Democracy lays out the context of the coming referendum on South Sudan. Then, Congressman Peter King of New York gives us a preview of the new priorities of the House Homeland Security Committee under his chairmanship. Finally, Washington Examiner war correspondent Sara Carter gets us caught up on the Pentagon beat.
FRANK GAFFNEY INTERVIEW WITH PETE KING
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Welcome back to Secure Freedom Radio. This is one of those segments that I have personally been looking forward to enormously and I think you’ll find profoundly important. It is a conversation with Congressman Pete King. Bill O’Reilly has said he’s the most important man in the new congress. I don’t know if he’ll agree with that. He’s a modest man. But I know that the work that he’s doing is as important as any that the congress will be taking up in the 112th Congress and that involves a set of hearings that you, Congressman Pete King, the incoming chairman of the new, I should say, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, have announced you intend to engage in—on the whole question of, well, radical Islam, shariah, whatever one wants to call it, but what we’re up against in terms of the threat, and I’d love to get your take, just sort of as an introduction to the piece, as to what you think needs to be looked into by your committee at this moment in time.
PETE KING:
Well, first off, you know, thanks for the kind introduction and I certainly do look forward to being chairman of the Homeland Security Committee again. I was chairman briefly back in ’05 and ’06–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Right.
PETE KING:
Before the Democrats took over. And the main thing I want to do is get the committee back to working on homeland security. We—in the last several years, never covered Guantanamo, never covered the Ft. Hood shootings, never had any sense of hearings into radicalization. All of that is going to change under my chairmanship. Now as far as the hearings on radicalization of the Muslim community, the reality is that many of the defenses, or the layer of defenses, that we have set up over the last nine years, has made it very difficult to al-Qaeda to attack us from the outside. They can, but it’s much, much more difficult than it was. They have adapted in turn. And they are now recruiting from within the United States. From within the Muslim community, from Muslims who are below the radar screen, who are living here legally. Who have roots in the community. Zazi, who was the attempted New York subway bomber a year and a half ago, he went to public high schools in Queens. Had a small business in lower Manhattan. Major Hasan, who murdered thirteen innocent people at Ft. Hood, was obviously a major in the United States Army. Shahzad, who attacked Times Square last May was a—actually, a naturalized citizen.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yeah.
PETE KING:
And we go through a whole list of others, whether it’s [UNCLEAR] in Chicago, whether it’s in cases in Baltimore, Texas, New Jersey, The Bronx. These are people living here legally in the country. Now, that is almost to be expected. What is not expected is the fact that we get very little cooperation from people living within the Muslim community–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yeah.
PETE KING:
The leadership of the Muslim community. There’s one case—I’ll just give you this as an example, and there’s others, in Minnesota. Where al-Shahzab, the Somali terrorist organization was actually recruiting young kids, I mean kids fifteen, sixteen years old, to be suicide bombers in Somalia. A number of them were killed. The parents of young boys in this community went to law enforcement and asked for something to be done. When an investigation was begun, the imam in the mosque instructed his members not to cooperate with the investigation. I can give you examples from my own district of—after 9-11, of prominent, prominent Muslims saying that Jews could have attacked Ground Zero, the FBI, the CIA, so this is a pattern and–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yeah.
PETE KING:
And it’s a matter of survival for our nation that we identify this and we focus attention on it.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
I couldn’t agree with you more. Congressman Pete King of the third district of New York, new chairman, once more, a restored chairman—I guess is the way to think of it–
PETE KING:
Right.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
–the Homeland Security Committee. If I could just drill down on that for a moment, Congressman King–
PETE KING:
Yeah.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
What you’re talking about and it’s earned you the appellation that I’ve been given myself of being a racist and a bigot and an Islamophobe, but it sounds like what you’re recognizing, thank God, is that within the Muslim community, even in this country, let alone elsewhere, folks are finding an environment in which, on the one hand, it’s very easy to be radicalized, if you will, to be brought to an adherence to shariah which leads to jihad, but also that there’s an enormous pressure on those within the community—presumably, I would imagine you agree, from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is much in place in this country, not to come forward, not to help us defeat what really is our common foe, namely the folks who want to impose shariah on all of us.
PETE KING:
Yeah, and Frank, this is very unusual for our country because despite the person’s ethnic background or religious background, when a war begins, we’re all Americans. But in this case, that is not the situation. And whether it is pressure, whether it’s cultural tradition or whatever, the fact is, the Muslim community does not cooperate anywhere near to the extent that it should. And, you know, the irony here is we’re really living in two different worlds. One is the real world that I find when I’m talking with police officers, talking to federal law enforcement authorities and when I raise the question of Muslim cooperation, they looked at me, like, of course not. There’s no cooperation. Yeah, we don’t anticipate that. You know, we never—almost never expect cooperation. They try. They hardly ever get it. Then, you read in the papers or you listen to the media, and it’s out there about how we’re one big happy family, everyone’s working together, anyone like Gaffney or King who raises this issue is a bigot. And the fact is that anyone dealing with the real situation just takes it as a matter of fact that there’s not going to be cooperation.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Yeah. Well, Congressman King, this is so critical and I trust this is going to be one of the things you get into in the hearings is that we hear—and I think you’re absolutely right, at this sort of street level, the working level, a lot of common sense about all of this, but at the senior levels of our government, the director of national intelligence, the FBI director, CIA and so on, are much about –the Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, most especially, are much about the idea that, while we’re reaching out to Muslim-American organizations like your friends the Council on American-Islamic Relations–
PETE KING:
Right.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
The Islamic Society of North America, MPAC, and on and on, most of whom are known by our government to be Muslim Brotherhood front organizations. So is it really any wonder that we’re getting no real cooperation even when we reach out to them as the DNI said, as a source of wisdom.
PETE KING:
Yeah. Well, even if you remember after Ft. Hood, General Casey, the Army Chief of Staff, said it will be a worse tragedy than the thirteen innocent people who were killed I few alienated Muslims as a result of these killings–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
[OVERLAP] Diversity–[LAUGHTER] Diversity is surprisingly important.
PETE KING:
But, no, it’s, you know, the leadership in not just the Muslim community, unfortunately, the leadership in our government, systematically, across the board, does go along with this politically correct nonsense. And they know it’s not true. And what they’ve set up now is a situation where they give credit to Muslims for cooperating when they’re not cooperating. And we know they’re not cooperating. And when someone such as myself says we’re going to have hearings, they oppose the hearings on the grounds that hearings are going to alienate the Muslim community. [LAUGHTER] And so, you know, this is a vicious cycle that’s been set up here–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
It is.
PETE KING:
Like, I’m not even going to, you know, get into a long, involved debate, but I’m just going to go ahead and do it. I mean, that’s where—you know, the New York Times can attack me and the other—and CAIR and all their, you know, proselytizers in the media who say I want to set up internment camps and I want to grab every Muslim off the street and subpoena them and all this nonsense. I’m just going to ignore it and go straight ahead and have these hearings. Because I think the common sense of the American people is going to see through all of this.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Well, God bless you, sir. And we look forward to covering them extensively, hopefully contributing in any way we can to these proceedings, because as I said, I think they are the single most important piece of business that the United States Congress will be doing in this 112th session. Let me pivot from the stealth jihad piece of this, which is so critical that you understand and that you’re working to counter, to a guy who clearly doesn’t get it. And, by the way, I spoke to your colleague, Congressman Mike Rogers, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and he said he wants to get into this as well. James Cole, and now the number two man in the Holder justice department. You’ve been very critical of this recess appointment. Give us your sense of how this fits in to the larger problem you want to address.
PETE KING:
Yeah, it’s a terrible decision for so many reasons. One, a recess appointment is always controversial. But if you’re going to do a recess appointment, it shouldn’t be someone such as Cole who, to me, is as bad if not worse than Eric Holder. We are involved in a war with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. And then you have someone like Cole who minimized the 9-11 attacks, basically said they were no different from drug deals, ordinary gang killings, that type of thing–
FRANK GAFFNEY:
He defended some of these guys as a lawyer.
PETE KING:
Yeah. [LAUGHTER] And for him not to see the difference, though, between what happened on 9-11, which most Americans saw that as such a singular moment, such an example of the most horrific attack ever on the U.S. and we had to do all we can to prevent it from happening again, for Cole to just dismiss it and for the president to appoint him as the number two person in the Justice Department, when we still have not resolved the issue of whether there’s going to be civilian trials, whether or not Guantanamo’s going to be closed, and I thought to appoint him without allowing Congress to have hearings, without allowing this entire [UNCLEAR] history to be brought out in a public forum, to me showed a real arrogance by the president and that the left wing ideologists, so they can talk about moving to the center, when he appoints someone like Cole, that shows where he’s really coming from.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
You’re so right.
PETE KING:
And it’s very dangerous to the country.
FRANK GAFFNEY:
Congressman, we have to let you go. I know you’ve got a day job to do. Thank you so much for joining us. God bless you and the work you’re about. We look forward to visiting you, I hope, in the future about this as often as you possibly can. In the meantime, keep up the great work. Next up, Sara Carter on our building down our military as the Chinese build theirs up.
