The U.S. Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York unsealed some of the documents related to the arrest of Agron Hasbajrami, an Albanian citizen and legal permanent resident of the U.S. Hasbajrami was charged with providing material support for terror because he sent money to a group he knew was engaging in terror and planned a trip to join the group’s fight in Pakistan. According an FBI press release about the unsealed documents, Hasbajrami tried to raise funds among Muslims in New York, but was rebuffed:

According to the government’s court filings, Hasbajrami sent over $1,000 to Pakistan to support his contact’s terrorist efforts. When asked to collect money from fellow Muslims for the terrorist cause, Hasbajrami reported that fundraising was difficult in New York because his fellow Muslims became apprehensive “when they hear it is for jihad.”

Hasbajrami’s failure to raise funds underscores what polling has long demonstrated: that Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reject violence.

Despite this evidence, Islamophobic terrorism “experts” — such as those profiled in CAP’s report “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network In America” — and politicians like Rep. Peter King (R-NY) tend to view the presence of Islam, writ large, as a terrorism problem in the U.S. The Islamophobic “experts” fail to distinguish between radical Islamic extremists and the broader Muslim population, and King’s hearings on domestic radicalization focused only on Islamic extremists.

The reality is that ordinary American Muslims have been helpful in the U.S. effort to combat terror at home. Sociologist Charles Kurzman, who talked to ThinkProgress last week, found so far in a study that about one third of the tips that led to foiled terror plots came from the Muslim American community itself. Kurzman noted that the threat from Muslim terrorism was actually quite small compared with other threats to public safety.

The Palestinian Authority will next week begin its push for membership at the United Nations. It’s unclear at this point whether the Palestinians will seek full membership or some other form of recognition as an independent state. Palestinian leadership figures have said the move represents frustration with the lack of progress in direct peace negotiations with Israel toward a two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in late 2009 that he supports the creation of a Palestinian state — though one that is, as CAP’s Matt Duss noted, “so severely circumscribed that it’s unlikely that any Palestinian leader could accept it and hope to retain Palestinian popular support.” While Netanyahu has never offered any concrete, substantive plan on how to implement the creation of a Palestinian state, his rhetoric since suggests that he has no real interest in pursuing this policy. In May, Netanyahu spoke before a fawning U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill and made a series of arguments that would make a two-state solution impossible.

But the main obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state is Jewish Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and Netanyahu has not made any serious effort to stop them. The prime minister’s settlement freeze last year lasted only 10 months. Since the freeze ended in September 2010, settlement construction in the West Bank jumped 660 percent and the Israeli group Peace Now found recently that there has been “nearly 2 times more construction in the settlements than in Israel.” Peace Now has mapped Israeli settlements in the West Bank with Jewish settlements and municipal areas in blue and light blue, respectively (click here for a larger version):

With settlers in the West Bank increasing at such a rapid pace, how would a two-state solution practically be implemented? Israel would have to evacuate tens of thousands of Jewish settlers from the West Bank (estimates put the number of settlers living there at around 500,000). Israel forcibly evacuated just 6,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and Netanyahu has vowed never to repeat such a scenario. “I won’t evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant,” he said in 2009.

So the creation of a Palestinian state requires that Israel forcibly evacuate tens of thousands of settlers from the West Bank while Netanyahu has shown no interest in stopping Israeli settlement expansion or evacuating settlers that are already there. So what’s next?

As CBS News’ Bob Simon noted in a report on the two-state solution for 60 Minutes back in 2009, “Demographers predict that within 10 years, Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state, the Israelis would have three options, none of them good”:

They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank. They could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option, but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could inflict apartheid, have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians. But apartheid regimes don’t have a very long life.

Tomorrow, the British Parliament will hold a hearing on the “roots of violent radicalisation” in the Muslim community in that country. The first witness before the committee will be Rep. Peter King (R-NY). King will reportedly be the first member of Congress to ever address a committee of Parliament.

While there is nothing wrong with hosting a hearing examining violent radicalization among British Muslims — just as the British government is probing radicalization among the far-right in Britain — it is a serious error in judgment to invite King. The congressman has been both a vocal supporter of anti-British terrorism in the past and conducted one-sided terror hearings in the U.S. more intended to paint all Muslims with a broad brush than delve into the roots of radicalization.

As Salon’s Justin Elliott documented earlier this year, King was a vocal supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) while it was committing terrorism against British civilians. In 1982, speaking at a pro-IRA rally, King said the United States should pledge “support” for the “brave men and women” using terrorism to resist the British presence in Northern Ireland:

“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.”

King, who has said Muslims are “an enemy living among us” and that there are “too many mosques in this country,” is not an appropriate “expert” to testify about radicalization in the United States. Additionally, multiple witnesses that King had wanted to call during his own investigation had to withdraw or be dis-invited due to their anti-Muslim bias. One witness withdrew because he was involved with a militia that tortured and killed Muslims, and another was rejected because of her stridently anti-Muslim views targeting not just extremism but the religion itself.

Despite the fact that almost twice as many terror plots since 9/11 came from non-Muslim groups, King refused to widen his hearings to examine radicalization in other areas. He even questioned the patriotism of Muslims in the United States, accusing the community of not cooperating with law enforcement authorities — despite the fact that around a third of terror plots that have been broken up since the 9/11 attacks were broken up with the help and assistance of Muslim American communities.

It hardly seems fitting to invite a man who has been involved in advocating for anti-British terror groups and whose own investigation into Muslim terror was incompetent and politicized to be the first Member of Congress to ever testify before Parliament on an issue as important to address as homegrown Muslim radicalization.