GOP Rep. Peter King Wants More Extensive Surveillance On Muslims, Because They’re Muslim

Representative Peter King responded to the shootings in Canada by saying that we need to increase surveillance on Muslims here in America. He thinks the increased surveillance is necessary to find out what people are thinking, and to find out what’s going on in Muslim communities, you know, to keep the rest of us safe.

According to Buzzfeed, King also blamed the Associated Press, The New York Times, and the ACLU for New York police not being able to maintain excessive surveillance on Muslims. He cited a system put in place shortly after 9-11, in which undercover police officers and paid informants would act as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” to gather intelligence on New York’s Muslim community. Rakers, for instance, would hang out in various local businesses, and write reports about what they saw, heard and discovered.

King said, specifically:

“We can have all the technology in the world, the fact is we have to find out what’s happening on the ground in these Muslim communities and we can only do that through increased surveillance.”

What the NYPD used to until those morons at the New York Times editorial board, and Associated Press, and American Civil Liberties Union went after them…the fact is we have to find what people are thinking. We have to find out who the radicals are. We have to find out what’s going on in the mosques which are often incubators of this type of terrorism.”

Back in February, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the city for the program, effectively upholding it, even though the spying was never based on suspicion of criminal activity. The program also produced no leads on terrorist activity, so it protected…absolutely nobody.

“Ah, but what if…” people might ask now. What if they had found someone? What if they’d found a cell? Then the program would have been justified, because people’s lives would have been saved. Not so fast. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, this program violates the 1^st and 14^th Amendments of the Constitution. People are watched because they’re Muslim, not because they have known or suspected ties to Muslim terrorists, or are suspected of being terrorists themselves (except for, well, they’re Muslim, which obviously makes them terrorists). So they’re watched because of their religion, and nothing else.

It’s unlikely Peter King would make this same argument if the religion in question was Christianity. Somehow, we know that Islam equals terrorism, but Christianity doesn’t. Oh wait. Yes it does, if we’re going to assume that religion and terrorism are the same thing. Just click here to read about how Christianity is a bigger influence on homegrown terror threats than Islam.

The plaintiffs in that lawsuit have appealed the dismissal. King probably hopes that higher courts will uphold the program, so it can continue to spy on Muslim Americans, for no reason other than they’re Muslim.

Featured image by David Shankbone, from USA - Ground Zero Mosque Protesters. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons