Peter King (R-NY): "Too Many Mosques in This Country"

The Politico ran a story about how Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said that there are "too many mosques in this country." Eventually, they updated the post with this:

The quote was taken entirely out of context by Politico. My position in this interview, as it has been for many years, is that too many mosques in this country do not cooperate with law enforcement. Unfortunately, Politico was incapable of making this distinction.

They also posted a video that lets you see the context:

We have too many mosques in this country, we have too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be looking at how we can infiltrate . . . we should be much more aggressive with law enforcement.

That really doesn't sound any better to me. On a policy level, though, in context we can see that King isn't really calling for a reduction in the quantity of mosques. Rather, his proposal seems to be that Muslims should be treated to a presumption of guilt and their religious institutions treated as criminal conspiracies to be infiltrated. I was going to try to construct an analogy about how King probably wouldn't be happy with a presumption of guilt being placed on Irish-American institutions, but it turns out King's actually a longtime IRA supporter (though, it seems, not since 9/11) so he must understand this dynamic on some level. And, of course, King turns out to have some history here:

King, who has said that all Muslims aren't terrorists but that all recent terrorists are Muslim, favors an ethnic and religious profiling scheme that would include foreign and American-born travelers. "I would give the investigators and screeners a lot of discretion as to where it ends," he said.

Despite King's endorsement of such a process, it is a technique that has been widely dismissed as a legitimate law enforcement tool.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, a childhood friend of King's whom the congressman calls one of the nation's leading counter-terrorism officials, has previously called racial profiling "nuts" and "ineffective," and eliminated the practice when he oversaw the U.S. Customs Service.

And, of course, King's belief that Muslim religious institutions should be treated as if they're criminal conspiracies makes more sense in light of his view that 85 percent of American mosques have extremist leadership, a delightfully made up fact that seems to undergird his thinking on this issue.

Comments

Actually, it seems to me that when King said "we have too many mosques in this country, we have too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam" he meant "We have too many mosques in this country sympathetic to radical Islam and we have too many people sympathetic to radical Islam." "Sympathetic to radical Islam" modified both previous clauses. In other words, not too many mosques per se, but too many mosques sympathetic to radical Islam (which is surely true - even one is too many). I think is the more obvious interpretation of the written text, but I admit that I'm not quite sure if it is supported by the cadences of his voice.

Posted by James Kabala | September 19, 2007 9:02 PM

We have too many churches in this country. We need to infiltrate them and find abortion clinic bombers and those who murder doctors.
Or blow up Federal buildings and Olympic parks.

Posted by merlallen | September 20, 2007 3:11 AM

Except McVeigh was an atheist, Rudolph was a disciple of Nietzche, and the number of abortion doctors and clinic workers killed in the U.S. is what, five people?

Posted by James Kabala | September 20, 2007 9:06 AM

It is, isn't it Matt, entirely fair to think we are too religious--I, for example, was bored witless by a biology teacher freshman year of high school who did not believe in evolution. He taught it, because I went to a school that required him to. But it is the central theory of biology--indeed, it made all of biology, including the study of it if we're to count memetics. I wish this teacher had been less religious, and if he were a muslim instead of a christian it would follow that I would wish he were less Islamic.

One can, and many do, disagree with the above thought. But it should not be a stigmatized thought; secularism must not be stigmatized, particularly at a time of religious and sectarian terror and violence like our own. So what, then, is wrong with the specific thought that we have too many mosques in this country? I am a liberal-minded person who is respectful to religious people and I agree. Of course, I do not think the state should set policy in this area (but why do we not tax what Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton do?), and believe this is an argument for people of cultural influence (like you) to work out and not something that calls for legislation.

Still, King is an idiot and an ass. The anti-Islamic paranoia of the right is irrational and hateful, with skewed demographics predicting a lost Europe and an America that is the last bastion of Christianity.

Matt, please make this distinction. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are not bigots. If you think they are, please say so. Otherwise, please be a bit more nuanced when some treats Islam like a witch to be burned.

Posted by Robert | September 25, 2007 2:39 PM