Good post on the Peter King hearings on terrorism

National Review has an editorial defending them.

Matt Feeney at The American Scene comments on it and doesn't agree doesn't agree:

“[E]xcessive concern with the pieties of multicultural relativism has prevented us from being sufficiently critical of Islamism.”  It continues: “A problem cannot be dealt with that is not faced foursquarely, and…we have for too long been a nation of cowards when it comes to addressing jihadist radicalism between our shores.”

So what has been missing from our fight against homegrown Islamism is a critique of it? And this owes to an “excessive concern with the pieties of multicultural relativism”? And the true first step in addressing this problem is “fac[ing]” it with a certain resolve, a certain nonrelativist foursquareness?

I honestly thought that such a critique would be redundant by now. Who needs to be convinced, through a critique of it, that homegrown Islamism is a bad thing? Who is addressing this danger with inadequate foursquareness? The Obama administration might not have come out publicly with a critique, per se, of Islamic radicalism grounded in a foundationalist interpretation of the Judeo-Christian-Western-Enlightenment-American-Exceptionalist Tradition, but, despite this, the Justice Department has gone ahead and arrested several of the subjects NR itself lists, anyway.

The editorial is a depressing reminder that much of the mainstream conservative intelligentsia views international politics and security policy as a bothersome girth of dog to be wagged by the tail of cultural polemics. Thus, what is missing from the fight against homegrown Islamism is a certain manner of talking about it, a public insistence from the highest levels that this fight is – per the Universal Morality from which emanates the American Exception (or is it vice versa?) – a just and good fight.