It is now part of the Congressional Record that Rep. Keith Ellison (D, Farmer-Labor Party-MN) teared up yesterday during his testimony at Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) hearings on the threat of homegrown Islamism.
What made Congress’s first Muslim convert (Ellison was born Catholic) misty was the outrageous-sounding tale of a fellow Muslim who made the ultimate sacrifice as a first responder on 9/11 only to be lumped together with the terrorists based solely on his religion. Here is a portion of the transcript of Ellison’s account:
After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.
The spiel, delivered emotionally, certainly tugged at liberal heart strings. A blogger named Missy Gluckmann penned a post titled “Weeping Alongside Rep. Keith Ellison Today,” in which she laments the outcome of blaming the many for the actions of a few, to wit:
fearful people directing their misinformation and anger toward the WRONG people, such as CHILDREN and legal citizens who have been born and raised in this country, who have done nothing wrong.
Gluckmann says in the same breath that she agrees with Ellison’s claims that “throughout human history, individuals from all communities and faiths have used religion and political ideology to justify violence,” which somehow sounds like an effort to dismiss the killing of 3,000 innocent Americans in the name of Islam by noting that others have committed similar acts of depraved indifference.
But back to Ellison’s testimony and the "lies" about Mohammed Salman Hamdani spread by “some people.” Which people Ellison never specifies, so let’s examine the record, starting with how most people treated Hamdani's self-sacrifice.
As Matthew Shaffer writes at National Review Online:
[S]ix weeks after the September 11 attacks—before Hamdani’s remains were identified, which Ellison implies to be the turning point of public perception—Congress signed the PATRIOT Act into law with this line included: “Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.” That is, Hamdani was actually singled out for particular high honors among the thousands of victims of the September 11 attacks. [Emphasis added]
Shaffer goes on to explain that the “some” who spread rumors about Hamdani were bloggers who distorted the content of a New York Post article dealing with an investigation by the FBI and NYPD into Hamdani’s whereabouts in the days following the attacks. It is a fact that, after police outside the Queens-Midtown Tunnel spotted someone who looked like Hamdani, authorities questioned the 23-year-old EMT’s family about his political inclinations. It is also a fact that Hamdani had entered the NYPD cadet training program and carried an official ID that would have given him entrée to secure locations. These actions are all part of standard investigative procedure. The leap from a newspaper report on them to a full-out character assassination based on religion is indeed someone’s but not the “some”-one that Ellison had in mind when he shed his crocodile tears at yesterday’s hearings.
In any event, Ellison ought to take care when he throws around loaded words like lie. If he ever finds himself testifying in an American court of law, he will need to take an oath to tell the truth while placing his hand over the Bible. Congress may not require that new members take an oath over a religious text, but the courts do—and despite Ellison’s preference for the Koran—the menu is limited to a single choice.
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