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Rep. Peter King Responds To Extremism Report, Says DHS Should Be Targeting ‘Mosques’ Instead

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report requested by the Bush administration that warned of the rising threat of right-wing extremism. The political right has been up in arms over the intelligence assessment, falsely claiming it is an assault on conservativism.

Today on MSNBC, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) used the release of the DHS assessment to advance his well-documented anti-Muslim agenda. King told Joe Scarborough that, instead of discussing the threat of anti-government radicals, DHS should focus on the threat emanating from “Muslims” and “mosques” at home:

KING: [Napolitano] has never put out a report talking about look out for mosques. Look out for Islamic terrorists in our country. Look out for the fact that very few Muslims come forward to cooperate with the police. If they sent out a report saying that, there would be hell to pay.

Scarborough agreed: “Oh, it would be blowing up!”. Watch it:

King often likes to blame “mosques” for terrorism. In 2007, he claimed that it is “unfortunate” that the U.S. has “too many mosques,” a remark that was swiftly condemned by Muslim groups:

Unfortunately, we have too many mosques in this country. There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully. We should be finding out how we can infiltrate.

Unfortunately, these types of remarks unfairly targeting Muslims are commonplace for King. He has previously claimed that Muslims are “the enemy among us.” “[Y]ou could say that 80–85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” he said in 2004.

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Furthermore, King suggested that DHS under Napolitano’s leadership is trying to downplay the threat of “Islamic terrorists.” Perhaps he should do his research before making such an outlandish claim.