Hearing on Terror Includes Heated Debate on Islam

State Senator Gregory Ball speaks during a hearing on homeland security.

In a local reprise of a polarizing Congressional hearing last month on the question of Islam and terror, state lawmakers warned in grave terms on Friday of the threats facing the New York area, while other lawmakers and interfaith groups criticized the proceedings as anti-Muslim and incendiary.

The hearing, which was convened by the State Senate’s homeland security committee, was something of a spectacle: Security was ramped up at the office building in Lower Manhattan where state legislators have work space, and television cameramen easily outnumbered lawmakers.

Adding to the theatrics, the hearing began to great fanfare with testimony from the lawmaker who convened the Congressional hearing, Representative Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican, who has promised further federal inquiries into what he describes as the radicalization of American Muslims.
Mr. King prefaced his comments by noting that “99 percent” of Muslims in the United States are “outstanding Americans” and not terrorists.

 

Michael Appleton for The New York Times Nonie Darwish, Director of Former Muslims United, testified at the hearing.

“But the fact is: The enemy, or those being recruited by Al Qaeda, live within the Muslim community, and that’s the reality we have to face,” Mr. King said. “This is not to put a broad brush over a community, but you go where the threat is coming from, and that’s the reality today.”

Mr. King testified at the invitation of Senator Gregory R. Ball, a Putnam County Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs. Mr. Ball was criticized by Muslim and interfaith groups as well as a group of Senate Democrats for his inclusion of Islamic law as one of the hearing’s topics; they accused him of exploiting the threat of terrorism to incite a fear of Muslims among the broader public.

But on Friday, as reporters crammed into a low-ceilinged meeting room for the daylong hearing, Mr. Ball defended the scope of the committee’s inquiry, saying that he asked lawmakers to propose other witnesses but received very little input.

“There are some who are more concerned about the front-page press than today,” Mr. Ball said. “I understand politics. But we cannot allow our homeland security to become a political football.”

Among the witnesses whose scheduled testimony provoked the most criticism was Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian-born American who is president of a group called Former Muslims United, and Frank Gaffney, a former Defense Department official who has often criticized Islam.

Ms. Darwish testified on Friday that young people in the Arab world are taught as children to hate America and to look favorably on terrorism. “The education of Arab children is to make killing of certain groups of people not only good,” she said. “It’s holy. It becomes holy in our culture.”

Her testimony was met with an angry rebuke from Senator Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, who held up a Koran and said that Ms. Darwish was “bringing hate and poison” to the hearing. Mr. Ball tried to quiet Mr. Adams, and their back-and-forth descended into a shouting match, with Mr. Adams suggesting that Mr. Ball was condoning bigotry and Mr. Ball accusing him of pandering to the news media.

“I’m glad that nobody is between those TV cameras and you, because that’s the most dangerous place in New York City right now,” Mr. Ball snapped.

In his testimony, Mr. Gaffney decried Sharia law as a threat to the United States and said that American efforts to prevent future acts of terrorism have been “hobbled, frankly, by what we consider to be politically correct blinders.”

He added that the Muslim community center and mosque proposed to be built near ground zero “fits the profile of triumphalist mosques built on sacred ground of defeated people elsewhere around the world.”
“I believe it should not be allowed to happen here,” Mr. Gaffney said.

While the testimony on Islam offered the most drama, the bulk of the hearing was spent discussing matters far less politically charged. A parade of law enforcement officials and counterterrorism experts offered what amounted to a verbal encyclopedia of terror threats, and legislators added their own possibilities, too.

Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican, wondered whether someone could shoot down an airplane using a heat-seeking missile. Mr. Ball asked about the safety of the AirTrain system at Kennedy Airport. And Mr. King worried about an attack on the New York City subway system or the use of a dirty bomb.

“I would just say that as we approach the 10th anniversary, not for people to look upon Sept. 11 as just some historical moment like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor or Bunker Hill,” Mr. King said. “It was the first battle in a war which is still being waged.”

At times, however, those at the hearing seemed less than interested in the technical discussion that dominated most of the session. During the testimony of Richard Daddario, the New York Police Department’s top counterterrorism official, at least three people in the audience were fast asleep.

[Source : cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com]