Excerpt:
In Times Square last Sunday, an estimated 1,000 people gathered to protest the March 10 hearings before Rep. Peter King's Committee on Homeland Security entitled "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response." The protesters called the hearings a "witch hunt."
Since there are no "witches" of the type portrayed in "Macbeth" or "The Wizard of Oz," the term is used to disparage people who believe there are terrorists and potential terrorists hiding among us. Events dating back long before September 11, 2001 prove there are.
The witness list isn't bad, per se, but it is incomplete. It includes Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali immigrant living in Minneapolis who, as director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center, works with Somali youth to dissuade them from turning radical. Bihi told Richard Meryhew and Allie Shah of the Star Tribune that he committed himself to working with young people after his 18-year-old nephew, Burhan Hassan, was recruited to fight in Somalia and then was "shot in the head after refusing an order." Burhan was killed, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reported in 2009, the very week his family had hoped to "celebrate his graduation."