Thursday, March 10, 2011

hearings on radical muslims in process . . .

. . . live here.

And in the interest of fairness, the list of witnesses called to testify is more well-rounded than I had supposed, as reported by WaPo.

The WaPo's Fact Checker, however, gives Rep. King two Pinnochios for his persistent leaning on the "80% radical muslim" statistic--discredited by now two important studies. Seems that before you'd hold a hearing on something so important that you'd get yourself in command of the facts. Sometimes personal narratives, for all their emotive strength, seem like lazy dialogic tricks to create misguided perceptions. Right now on C-Span, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) is telling a story about how he has a Muslim friend--a "very dear friend"--who almost died in a restaurant bombing in Somalia. Somehow this is supposed to tell us something about American Muslims.

Joanna Brooks draws a fascinating historical analogy with the anti-Mormon congressional hearings when Reed Smoot was elected to the U.S. senate in 1903.

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