WASHINGTON: Congress pushed deep into a raw and emotional debate over American Muslims in a hearing punctuated by tearful testimony, angry recriminations and political theater. Republican Rep. Peter King declared Thursday that US Muslims are doing too little to help fight terror in America. Democrats warned of inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment and energizing Al-Qaeda. Just holding the conversation, he said, advanced the fight against Al-Qaeda's efforts to recruit one-man terrorist cells from within American Muslim communities and to suppress any effort to report those activities to law enforcement officials. King next will turn to the issue of Muslim extremism in American prisons in hearings planned later this year. Framed by photos of the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon, the families of two young men blamed the Muslim community for inspiring young men to become terrorists. On the other side, one of the two Muslims in Congress wept while discussing a Muslim firefighter who died in the attacks. The sharp divisions reflect a country still struggling with how best to combat terrorism nearly a decade after the September 2001 attacks. Al-Qaeda has built a strategy recently around motivating young American Muslims to become one-man terror cells, and the US government has wrestled with fighting that effort. King, a congressman from New York and the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the House of Representatives, said he called the hearing because Muslim community leaders need to speak out more loudly against terrorism and work more closely with police and the FBI. Democrats wanted the hearing to focus on terror threats more broadly, including from white supremacists. Thursday's hearing was the first high-profile event for the new Republican majority in the House, and it roused the city. The room was packed, and officials steered onlookers into an overflow. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, wept as he discussed Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Pakistani-American paramedic who died responding to the World Trade Center attack. “This committee's approach to this particular subject, I believe, is contrary to the best of American values and threatens our security, or could potentially,” Ellison said.
