Rep. King mouths off.
There's a policy response the United States needs to consider in the wake of the Norway mass murders, and that's
acting on an already recognized threat that has been ignored for political reasons.
In 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security produced a report, “Rightwing Extremism,” suggesting that the recession and the election of an African-American president might increase the threat from white supremacists, conservatives in Congress strongly objected. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, quickly withdrew the report and apologized for what she said were its flaws.
Daryl Johnson, the Department of Homeland Security analyst who was the primary author of the report, said in an interview that after he left the department in 2010, the number of analysts assigned to non-Islamic militancy of all kinds was reduced to two from six. Mr. Johnson, who now runs a private research firm on the domestic terrorist threat, DTAnalytics, said about 30 analysts worked on Islamic radicalism when he was there.
The killings in Norway “could easily happen here,” he said. The Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan accused last year of plotting to kill police officers and planting bombs at their funerals, had an arsenal of weapons larger than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks combined, he said.
Homeland Security officials disputed Mr. Johnson’s claim about staffing, saying they pay close attention to all threats, regardless of ideology. And the F.B.I. infiltrated the Hutaree, making arrests before any attack could take place.
While staffing levels in DHS for domestic terrorism might be in dispute, Napolitano's response to right-wing criticism following the 2009 report is not. The report was withdrawn, and DHS had essentially gone quiet on the issues of right-wing domestic terrorism.
The extremists on the right wing, however, haven't held back. One of the primary critics of that 2009 report was Rep. Peter King, who said at the time, "[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."
In the wake of the Norway attack, King is keeping up his anti-Muslim drumbeat.
Despite these revelations of right-wing terrorism, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) — who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee — has announced that he will continue his series of investigations focusing exclusively on Islamic terrorism and will not widen them to include other forms of terror[....]
As ThinkProgress noted at the time of his first hearing examining exclusively the radicalization in Muslim communities, there have been almost twice as many terror plots from non-Muslims than Muslims in the United States since 9/11.
King cannot and should not be the primary voice on the issue of terrorism in our government, and now is a particularly good time for the administration and for other members of Congress to combat his bigotry.